Preserving the writing of BB for posterity. Another project of the AntiPorn Activist Network.

It is a fact, not a conjecture, that women are harmed in the making of porn, not just in the making of illegal porn, not just in the making of foreign porn and not just in the making of porn that isn’t one of the top three producers of magazines.

Women are hurt making all porn, at all levels and types of porn. Sex slaves and children have been found in every single genre of porn, from mainstream Penthouse all the way down to foreign snuff films. Women and children have been exploited at every single level of porn. When one consumes porn one fuels a market that does hurt women and children, at every single level. There are no exceptions to this rule. Sure, not every woman in a given photo is a slave or a child, but they do exist and they have been uncovered almost universally in every manufacturer of mainstream porn. Even if YOUR publication hasn’t yet been found to have had underage women or slaves working for them, it doesn’t mean it won’t. The proof of this is that the major publications have had scandal after scandal of underage girls as well as women who were held as slaves by their husbands.

There is no way for you, or for any other consumer of Porn, to know the true ages of the girls in your dirty pictures. There is no way for you to know the girl’s histories, you CANNOT know if the girl you are masturbating to is, in reality, a sexual slave from Austria who has a gun pointed at her head just off camera.

From the rankest of the rank to the high society porn, there have been scandals in all levels of porn. And, as an ethical human being, I made a decision many years ago that I would not, could not, support an industry in which women are harmed. For me, I have decided that there are no acceptable losses. My number is zero. And I live by that number every day. For ME there is no way that I can masturbate to porn while the possibility exists that the girl could be a child, or a slave. That’s what No Acceptable Losses means. And there is always a possibility that that girl is a child, or a slave. Of that, there can be no doubt because it has already happened, and it continues to happen.

Acceptable losses are something we deal with every day. I, like most of us, drive a car. I do so with the understanding that even MY car, a little Dodge Neon, causes environmental issues. Even MY car emits nastiness into the air. I have weighed this in my head and have decided that I will continue to drive a car but I will do so knowing that I am contributing to ozone issues and global warming. My hands are not clean. I have determined that there is “Acceptable Losses” because the benefits of driving my car outweigh, for me, the risks involved. I must drive a car to support my family, and, supporting my family is more important than the damage my car is doing to the environment. Therefore, I drive a small car that gets good gas mileage and I do my part to help out, even though I understand that I have made a concession. I drive my car knowing that I am contributing to Global Warming.

Let¹s take certain drugs. Viagra for instance. Let’s assume that 2 men go blind while using Viagra. I look at the benefits of this drug and weigh it against the risks. I decide that 2 men going blind are worth the benefits. I have Acceptable Losses on Viagra. I am willing to sacrifice those few men to the perceived greater benefit to the millions of others.

Everyone has acceptable losses. Many of us are aware of the part we play and we have made good choices that are in keeping with who we think we are. Many more of us simply choose to do whatever we want to do without even thinking about what our margin of Acceptable Losses is. Those who do think about it weigh the importance of the benefit they receive from the product vs. the risks involved to others, to the environment, to society and to themselves. They then determine whether or not the risks are worth it.

We’re all pretty much in agreement on things like Heroin and Crack. We, as a society, look at the benefits of Heroin to the user and we weigh it against the risks to society, the environment and the user him/herself. Most of us then decide that Heroin HAS no Acceptable losses, therefore, as a society; we make it illegal in an effort to tell the Heroin industry that their losses are not acceptable to society at large. Sure, we may not get all of the Heroin, we may not even get most of the Heroin, but, as a society we have made it illegal to possess and use heroin JUST to show that we don’t think that the benefits outweigh the risks. We are telling the Heroin users, dealers and manufacturers that their product has too many losses for us to deem it acceptable.

Occasionally, society goes in a different direction and, instead of basing their judgment on risks vs. benefits they just make a gut determination that isn’t based on anything other than their feelings on the topic at hand. A clear example of this is Gays and Lesbians. Much of this society has launched a war on Gays and Lesbians, saying that the risks do not outweigh the benefits. Many of us have simply decided that Gays are bad; we have made a gut decision that doesn’t appear to have been made on anything really concrete. When one pushes an anti-gay activist on exactly why they’re anti-gay, one normally ends up with some version of, “It’s just, Ewwww, it’s just not natural” Rational thinking people appear puzzled at this because they see that there is no rational in the anti-gay movement other than, “We just don’t LIKE it!”.

When one speaks to an anti-gay person one can put forth all the documentation they want to disprove the old standbys like, “It raises the AIDS rate”, when we show them that Lesbians have a lower AIDS rate than heterosexual men they still persist. “It harms marriage!” When one shows them that heterosexuals have ‘harmed marriage’ well enough on their own they still persist. We can knock down every one of their arguments with real statistics, real numbers, and it does no good. One comes away feeling as though they have spent several hours beating their heads against a brick wall. As it turns out the anti-gay folks have determined that their desire to not be offended is more important than the desire of the gays to live happy, harmonious lives with the person of their choice. There is no ‘real’ reason that gays shouldn’t be allowed to be together, the statistics show that there is no more damage done than there is in the straight community by gays. The numbers prove that there is little harm in gays being allowed to be…well…gay.

Now, some people have a particular interest in one area. For example, many folks who belong to Green Peace do not drive cars of their own because to them, they have zero Acceptable Losses as it pertains to the environment. Admittedly, this is a difficult way to go, there are many, many things that harm the environment, but they have determined that the environment is the area in which their number is ZERO.

I am a Feminist. Therefore I, as a Feminist, have decided that there are no acceptable losses as it pertains to Women. As a Feminist, women are my top priority. Stopping violence, rape and abuse as well as creating true equality for Women is where my interests lie. I know this about myself, I have thought a great deal about it, I know my mind and I know where it lay, I know what is important to me and I have determined that Women are important to me. I love Women, I adore women (and no, I’m not a lesbian) but I acutely feel the pain of women. I empathize with women and when a woman hurts, I hurt. When I hear a story about the rape of a woman my heart is heavy and I want to cry, sometimes, I do cry, every time my body shudders in empathy for that woman.

This is probably not unlike an environmentalist who shudders when they hear that another tree has been cut. Somehow, they empathize with that tree, they believe that they can feel the pain of that tree. They are wounded when another forest is cut. THIS is why they chain themselves to trees and make shields of their own bodies.

In my life I have come to realize that, for me, there are no acceptable losses as it pertains to women. I hear the screams of the raped women. I hear the howls of indignation from women like my mother, women who have lived a caged life. I hear the shrieks of fear and terror from the abused women, the sobs of the drug-addicted prostitutes; I hear the confused babble of the young girl lifting her shirt for Girls Gone Wild. I hear the chaos of their screams. I empathize with them, I feel with them, for them. Their voices are so near to me and my body shudders and my stomach flips when I hear of another sex slave released from her masters. My mind hears her terror and my head shows me her torture and I get physically ill over her pain.

Their cries drown out any compunction I may have to forget their pain. I simply cannot forget their pain. It slices into me over and over again, with every story, with every bruised face and bruised body I feel their pain. The pain of the children in Bangkok when men penetrate their 12 year old bodies washes over me as a river of blood. The defeated sadness in the woman who is forced to have sex with a man on camera hits me as a sledgehammer, it lays heavy on my skin like filth I cannot free myself from. I feel it. I feel so much of their pain that it is sometimes frightening to me.

I wish to the Gods that I could shut it off, that I could conveniently forget their pain so I could live a full life in a land that hates Feminists. A land that calls us frigid, or rabid. A land in which I am considered extreme and man-hating a land in which I am told that my boys will turn out to be misogynist asses because I feel the pain of women. Gods know that I would love to be able to turn the radio station in my head, to remain oblivious to the blank eyes and dead movements of the strippers in the local crotch club. I would love to be able to navigate through this life, safe from the venom and fury that is cast upon me because I have chosen the label “feminist”, because I can feel their pain. My life would be so much less complicated if I could just hop on the internet and look up “Teenage pussy” without seeing the dead eyes that accompany their lipsticked faces. If I could watch a porn movie featuring a woman being anally fucked without hearing the change in her tone as it goes from fake pleasure to real honest to fucking goodness pain.

I have wished for this very often. But you know what? I can’t turn it off. I simply can’t NOT see their pain, I can’t NOT hear their screams, and I can’t ever, in good conscious, turn my head to their misery. I can never place my orgasm above THEIR pain. Even if it’s only 1, my number is ZERO, not 1, not 2 and not 55,000.

When I hear the story of Linda Lovelace I feel her pain, her indignation, I can imagine her torment as she was forced to have sex with animals. Her fear as her husband whored her out to other men for the camera. The terror she felt when she ran away, when she escaped and was brought back. Her humiliation stains my hands and her screams ring through my soul, she is a banshee, crying at the indignation she suffered for no other reason than to make people cum. She is not the only one. She is one of so many that their faces blur and their screams coalesce into one long, piercing wail.

It happens. The Pornography industry chews them up and spits them out, it eats them and its supporters accept this as inevitable. There is no way for a man, or woman, to look me in the eye and try to tell me that their number is zero when they go home and type in “XXX Pussy” on their keyboard.

It’s very much like the Gay argument. I show proof rock solid, hardcore proof that these things are happening. That young girls, children, are being posed for the camera. Tracy Lords starred in 77 full length movies before she reached 18. Seventy-seven movies. Seventy-fucking-seven. She was a child of 15. A freshman in High-School. MILLIONS of men, around the world, masturbated to this child to this little girl being raped by 3 or 4 men. Millions of men and women alike got off to images of a 15 year old girl.

Many of them felt badly after they found out about it. Many of them hid their secret away, not wanting to admit to it. But you know what? They went right back to their local video store and got another movie with another girl in it, knowing full well that she might be a child. It is obvious to me that, for these people, it’s a sad thing that a young girl was used so terribly, but it is an Acceptable Loss. These folks have determined that their orgasm is more important than the lives of children that this industry takes.

They put up wall after wall. Telling themselves that this stuff only happens in anything that isn’t the stuff they are watching. They make excuses, over and over again. And then, finally, when someone pins them to the wall and they are unable to move the attention from the Acceptable Losses fact they get angry and they lash out and they say cruel, cutting things. They call us ‘prudes’ they say we’re ‘rabid’ they say we want to ‘stifle their rights’ they say any combination of things to push the spotlight away from them. Away from the “What’s your number?” question. Why? Because, they are ashamed to admit that they don’t HAVE a number. They spin their wheels and they dance and they use buzzwords like “Empowerment” and “Free Speech” but they dance away like so many sprites in the night when you ask them “What’s your number?”

They claim the question is irrelevant. If it were irrelevant then why not just answer it? They create big long arguments that basically amount to “Nuh uh! Not in MY porn” They discount the stories of the women and children themselves, they smear the women who have come forth and said that these things did happen to them. They insist that it’s those other porn manufacturers that do these things, not their porn manufacturer. Even when the proof is shown to them that Penthouse, and Playboy and Hustler have all seen their share of scandals, even when you point out that this does happen in ‘mainstream porn’ they dance and they jiggle and they do the Macarena but they won’t answer the question. They refuse to answer, “What’s your number?” and thereby show all those around them that they do in fact, value their orgasm over the lives of little girls, over the lives of women who are taken from their homes or coerced into leaving their homes for “A better life in America”, a life that consists of porn by day and prostitution by night. A life of an object a life of being gang-raped by men, by being forced to ‘service’ upwards of 20 men a day.

Their screams aren’t silent to me. I hear them, I feel them, and I cry. I weep and I sob and I get angry and I scream, “Why?” to anyone that will listen. Why are we expendable? Why are the screams of a child not enough to turn the eyes of the man from the pictures? Why are the sobs of the slave not enough to turn his gaze from her rape?

This is the main reason I despise Pornography. There are so many others, but this one fills me with a hopelessness I can barely articulate. How can a woman watch pornography and not hear the screams? How can they hear the numbers and tell themselves, “Not in my Porn!” How can a woman, who labels herself “Feminist” walk with the blood of slaves on her hands, the screams of children in her soul, and leave them behind?

I will not patronize an industry that enslaves people in ANY number. I will not show them that there is a market for their brutality, even if that brutality is only one woman in a far away land. I am confused by the number of people who believe that their orgasm is more important than life. For that is what they are saying, even if they dance, even if they build walls. What they are doing is showing the pornographers that there is more of a market for it. Showing them, very clearly, that they Accept the Losses. That the losses are ‘inevitable’ and therefore, acceptable.

It confuses me that someone can place so much value on a titillating picture. That a living, breathing human being who is part of the same race as I am, the race of humankind, can so completely ignore the screams of the innocent for something as mundane as an orgasm. It falls beyond my capability to understand, I ask my partner all the time, “How? How can they know the numbers, how can they know the abuses and continue to watch? Continue to go to their favorite website, or eagerly rip open that new copy of Penthouse knowing that THAT publication has used children. Has photographed the RAPE of children? How?” And my voice cracks and my eyes grow cloudy as my mind seeks to grasp the mechanism by which they rationalize it.

It also occurs to me that, in these people, these people who continue to watch Pornography even after knowing the statistics there is a more insidious implication there. Something that is grotesque in its honesty.

In believing that there are Acceptable Losses in the making of Pornography (and they do believe it, they prove it each and every time they look at it) they are also, by default, saying that rape is also acceptable. How? Why? It’s simple. Nobody denies that there are honest to goodness sex slaves that are used to make pornography. They may dance and say that it’s not in their porn, they may build walls and insist that THEY don’t fuel a demand for pornography when they look at it, but they won’t deny that it exists. Even they can’t deny this fact. In accepting the idea of sex-slavery in pornography they have accepted the idea of rape in Pornography. When they acknowledge that a 15 year old child starred in 77 movies by well known Pornographers they are admitting that there is rape involved on some level in the making of mainstream porn. And Tracy Lords’ porn WAS mainstream porn. A 15 year old child is unable to legally consent to sex, therefore, it’s rape.

When they go back to look at their porn, after having all these facts, after knowing and acknowledging that rape does occur they foster an acceptance of rape, even IF they insist that it’s not in THEIR porn they understand that rape does occur in porn and that the industry, as a whole, should not be banned just because of a ‘few’ rapes. They have bought the idea that some rape is acceptable.

Taken to its logical conclusion, this mode of thinking would have us set a number of rapes each year that were ‘free’ rapes. Rapes that should be legal. If nothing is wrong with accepting a few rapes in our quest for Pornography, then what is the difference in accepting a ‘few rapes’ throughout the year? Acceptance of Pornography is Acceptance of Rape. If, after hearing the facts, you decide to look at porn you are saying that those women, those children, and their rapes, are acceptable. If your number is more than zero, if you think that even 1 rape is acceptable to bring you your XXX pictures then it should also be legal to rape one woman per year. When the ball drops in Times Square the first rape of the year should be free and clear.

If you believe that sex-slavery is acceptable to create Pornography you believe that rape is acceptable. If you think it’s NOT acceptable but you continue to look at porn you are telling the world that it IS acceptable. It really *is* that simple. It doesn’t matter what you want to believe. It doesn’t matter if you say you are adamantly against rape. If you look at porn, knowing that rape occurs in the industry, knowing that slavery occurs as part and parcel, as an inherent THREAD in the industry, then you are saying that Rape is Acceptable. Your actions are showing your values, your actions are showing just where you place rape and slavery at on the scale of what your orgasm is worth.

I can’t help but wonder how quickly our Government would act if we found out that the tobacco companies kidnapped and raped people in their manufacturing of cigarettes. I can’t help but wonder just how quickly the Government would act if it found out that 45,000 to 55,000 men were being kept as sexual slaves in the good ol’ U.S. of A. How quickly would Bush organize a task force to shut down the tobacco companies? How quickly would they create a “Anti-slavery taskforce” if it were for anything BUT the sex industry?

These women are considered expendable by men, women and even self-labeled Feminists. They are a nasty little thought that we don’t like to dwell on when we discuss how “empowering” and how “harmless” the Pornographic industry is. When we run to our keyboards and masturbate to their images we are masturbating to their collective screams, their collective rapes and we LIKE it. We FIGHT to continue to allow them to be raped and abused. We fight like hell to keep it, just like the anti-gay people fight like hell to say gays are bad; we fight because we LIKE it. We fight because we don’t CARE, sure, we may tsk and shake our heads and say, “I don’t agree with the abuses in Pornography” but it’s empty and it’s hollow because we run right back home and make sure the kids are in bed and we look up, “Wet sluts take it all” and we touch ourselves and when we are done we may feel badly, but not quite badly enough. We distance ourselves from their horror like we distance ourselves from so many horrors in our world.

And when we hear about another child who was featured in Penthouse, another child who got paid less than $50,000 for the total of 4 years that she made her living fucking adult men when she, herself, was a mere child we tsk and we shake our heads and we say, “I don’t agree with it” but then we say, “I never saw HER perform, I never saw HER movies, therefore I have clean hands” and we go home and rip open our new copy of Penthouse which, at one time featured HER body posed and spread as a buffet of 15 year-old flesh, and we jerk off to it and we silence her screams once and for all. And then we get angry and we scream and we cry out in indignation to those prudish, holier-than-thou Feminists who proudly say, “My number is zero”.

I have never been able to figure it out. And it terrifies me because we, as a society, have determined that there are Acceptable Losses to orgasm. And that thought scares me shitless, because I have hope that I can someday live in a world in which the screams are gone. That’s the reason that I am so adamant and why I harp so loudly and so rudely on Pornography. Because I don’t accept rape, and I refuse to accept the logic that it’s worth it, that there are Acceptable Losses for me to achieve my orgasm. ~Biting Beaver

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve gotten several links to articles which are reporting that pornography on the internet decreases rape rates. Apparently someone out there has decided that because reported rape rates have fallen it must be due to the vast amounts of pornography on the internet.

Here is one of those articles: How The Web Prevents Rape. I haven’t responded to any of this because, well, to be perfectly honest I really didn’t see the need to. When you take a stance like mine on pornography you start to see some really ridiculous ‘studies’ and this is no exception.

In this ‘study’ what the researchers did was to literally take the reported rape rates and then take reported internet usage, not just porn usage but internet usage as a whole, and when they saw that reported rapes were down, they inferred that it must be due to pornography on the internet.

There are so many reasons that this is a fallacious assumption to make.

1. Nobody bothered to ask what these people were doing online, it is, of course, assumed that people are browsing FreeXXX sites. Apparently these researchers think that men have nothing better than to peruse pornography sites all day.

2. Where is the consideration for the vast amount of work that women’s groups have engaged in designed to decrease rape? In one fell swoop all of the effort, time and money of women’s groups who have begun grassroots campaigns all over the place to prevent rape have been erased.

3. They didn’t correct or account for the fact that perhaps more women are simply not reporting rape. With the recent influx of women who have been charged with a crime when there isn’t enough proof to convict her accused rapist I think that this is certainly an extremely important factor to consider. Indeed, the climate surrounding the Duke case and many others like it has undoubtedly had an impact. I now speak to many women who immediately state that they would not, under any circumstances, report their own rapes.

4. The ‘researchers’ on this study clearly believe that rape is sex and nothing more.

Notice that these studies always compare reported rapes, not actual rapes. There are many problems with studies like this that place them unequivocally into the camp of junk science.

Only one of many problems is the equation of sex and rape. The underlying message beneath all of these studies is that men are seeking sex when they violently rape a woman. In a society which classes porn as little more than ‘naked people fucking’ the only conclusion that said society will come to upon hearing such a claim is that men are simply taking sex from females when they rape them.

This has extraordinarily troubling implications even if we assumed that it wasn’t a load of shit. It implies that men are so dangerous that they must literally be fed a diet of pornography to keep them from harming women. As a class they are so out of control and terrifying that if we don’t let them see women being fucked then they will violently take women against their will.

I know some men who would vehemently disagree with this idea and rightly so. I am often called a man-hater which is always amusing to me because when we really look at what researchers like this are trying to say it is clearly THEM who hate men. I personally believe that men are NOT out of control beasts that require a steady diet of degradation to relieve their terrifying urge to rape women. But this study, and studies like this one, always reduce men to creatures who are incapable of not raping unless and until we give them what they want.

Sex is not rape. Rape is not sex. I have done articles on this before, indeed, I have done many articles on the topic. Rape is violence and control using sex as the weapon. Rape is the action by which a man takes control and autonomy from a woman, sex is the tool. Rape is the culmination of deep seated hatred and lack of empathy by men against women. Penetration is merely one of the most effective ways in which they can degrade and dehumanize us.

To men, perhaps rape is simply sex. But to women who have been raped there is a very clear difference. Rape is about forcing a woman, through a myriad of ways, to succumb to the will of the man. For the rapist it is not penetration that he’s looking for, it’s the ‘kill’. It’s the victory of taking a woman that is the high and the rush. And this entire society condones and even conditions men to use whatever means necessary to get that ‘win’.

Women who experience this are fully aware of it. It’s not about the orgasm, it’s about the ‘win’ that they get when they bend a woman to their demands either by sheer force, threatening body language, taking her other options away or some other means.

So that is just one very large problem with this sort of study. Rape is not sex and sex is not rape. These are dangerous studies because they imply that if every man has his orgasm demands met then he won’t rape and this in turn, implies that to keep women safe we MUST feed men a steady diet of images of women that they can use and orgasm to. Even if we take the same assumption that the ‘researchers’ take and assume that porn is just good clean fun we are still left with troubling facts that are very hard to get around and terrifying to even the bravest of women. That message is this:

If women don’t placate men’s desire to orgasm then men will hurt women.

This mindset sets up a ‘blame the victim’ paradigm. It places the responsibility for male violence onto the shoulders of women. It assumes that women must give men the orgasm they desire or men will rape us to get more of it. In so doing this paradigm also creates a subset of women who will always be ‘fed’ to male desire, acting as a sacrificial lamb to keep the rest of us safe. When this mindset bears fruit it will always be in the form of victim blaming. Male violence against females will inevitably be blamed on females, either on the victim directly or onto females as a group because the theory rests on the notion that men cannot control themselves and must orgasm to real live women in order to be reasonably expected to control themselves.

Therefore a man who rapes a woman will always be held with less responsibility than the female whom he raped or females at large in the society. Because of his ‘need’ for orgasm clearly if she turned him on or did something ‘inappropriate’ it’s her fault.

The male drive for orgasm is likened to the predatory drive seen in large carnivores. We can’t really blame the lion, even if it’s a ‘tame’ lion, for lunging after the goat because that’s what lions do. When we slip into this sort of description for male orgasm then we almost invariably wind up saying, “Well, you can’t blame the guy for raping her because he was taken over by his desire to orgasm and that’s what men do.”

Other flaws in this junk science are that reported rapes reflect actual number of rapes. This particular story even assumes that violent movies curb the urges of men to be violent. It comes to this conclusion by assuming that when violent movies are running in the theatres that violent men are watching these movies instead of being violent against others.

As it pertains to rape however, I find it frightening that any ‘scientist’ would assume that reported rapes are the same as actual rapes. We have recently seen a virtual plethora of rape cases in which the victim is brutalized by the media and the public. Her accusations fall onto deaf ears because they assume that she is a liar. She then morphs into the villain in the media and openly on the internet, in newspapers and so forth. The Duke case is only one of these; many more cases follow behind this one.

Women understand that the moment a rape charge is leveled that the cries of “She’s a lying whore!” are soon to come. Because of this many women are deterred from reporting rape, add this to the basic assumption of people that rape is sex and she becomes even more afraid to report her trauma.

Recently there have been many cases in the media that have gone terribly wrong for the woman who reports the rape. In one case a young woman reported being gang raped by her boyfriend and his friend when she was getting ready for a party. The men, of course, claimed that it was consensual. When the young woman appeared before the judge he determined that she wasn’t “acting like a victim” and he dropped the charges against the men and instead charged her with filing false charges. Based upon nothing more than what he perceived a rape victim should act like.

In yet another case a woman was threatened with jail when she refused to watch a videotape of her rape and be cross-examined about it in front of the courtroom. She said that it would be too traumatic and utterly refused to do it. The woman was very nearly jailed for refusing to watch her own rape on television until public outcry softened the judge’s stance.

In case after case we see young women who have been violated run through the emotional trauma of criminal charges leveled against them if they don’t fit the preconceived notion of what a ‘good’ rape victim should act like. Strippers are clearly not ‘good’ victims, nor are prostitutes, nor are women who wanted to have sex, nor are women who dress provocatively or women who are drunk or women who got willingly drunk, or women who had consensual sex with their rapists in the past, or women who are wives to their rapists, the list goes on and on.

In trial after trial we see every manner of situation being described in the same way. Women watch as the media slashes at women who report rape and public outcry says that it’s a case of ‘boys being boys’. When young men write emails saying that they will kill a woman and then, later that day, they are accused of rape, their actions are still minimized.

When a videotape of young men raping a mentally handicapped girl, urinating on her, lighting her hair on fire and so forth, is brought into the public eye we immediately see the media encourage the sentiment that ‘boys will be boys’.

Women are not stupid and repeatedly watching and absorbing these horrific trials will have a very predictable effect on even the bravest of us. Watching women being called whores, sluts and would be porn stars is terrifying to all of us. Even when the rape has been videotaped we watch, in horror, as the victim is martyred in the community and has her name and image plastered around the town.

With stories like these women are afraid of speaking up and pressing charges. They refuse to be forced to explain themselves, explain why they wore what they wore and why they didn’t do this or that. They refuse to put themselves through even more trauma for the sake of a conviction and would rather try to heal on their own.

So no, ‘studies’ like these that claim that porn is reducing rape rates based upon little more than the observation that reported rapes are down while porn usage is up, are both dangerous and unfounded. I have much more to add to this but I find myself completely out of time for the moment. Perhaps I’ll come back later and add to this later but for now I have a stall to fix.

It seems that the recent flap here at The Den over the EC fiasco sent a few folks shuffling through the archives and posting all willy nilly on my anti-porn posts. Of course, this is not unexpected since that most beloved of all patriarchal doll babies is pornography and any threat to the almighty power of porn (either real or imagined) must be taken as a personal assault. And so, our pornified friends have been popping in on random posts and spouting the exact same porn-defenses that I have repeatedly addressed in my many different posts about pornography and the dangers it poses to women and children.

Of course, each and every single one of these people believes that when they click on the ‘publish comment’ button they honestly have some enlightening piece of wisdom that I have never addressed. I call this the ‘Silver Bullet’ line of thinking. All of them come up with a tired old song and dance that I have dealt with ten times over but each and every single one of them believes that they have found a unique perspective on a topic which I have studied time and again. All of them are sure that they have come up with the silver bullet needed to take down this anti-porn feminist.

And so it continues. I post an article discussing, in great length, why a given argument doesn’t work. I post statistics and numbers and studies. I post government findings as well as scholarly works devoted to the subject of pornography and the damage it does to women and children. I go through my hard drive and peruse the internet looking for the newest information available to back up my claim that X excuse has been debunked 1000 times over. I wrap it up in a neat little bow and publish it.

A week later some idiot leaves a remark on a different anti-porn post giving me the exact same excuse that I debunked on another post a mere week before. And of course these folks think that they are the first ever to give me this particular excuse, they seem to believe from the pit of their indignant little guts, that they have stumbled across my ‘silver bullet’. Now, when I get these people with their self-proclaimed ‘original’ theories I roll my eyes and shake my head sadly. Their comments put me in the unenviable position of either:

1. Letting them get through moderation where theirs will be the very last comment on a thread that has been inactive for some time.

2. Refusing to unmoderate the comment and deleting it instead.

I normally decide to do #2. My reasoning is simple. I am well aware that people peruse the archives; many people stop by here on their journey through feminism. The very last thing I want them to see while they’re hunting through the archives is the half-assed comment of a twerp who couldn’t be bothered to read the gazillion other articles I have written on the topic. The last thing I want is for a budding feminist to read their tripe (which I have carefully debunked in other posts) and believe that the uniformed argument actually has merit.

Indeed, the very fact that I never addressed the comment can sometimes lead a person to believe that I couldn’t address it. And that, in and of itself, can instill doubt in the anti-porn argument for a new feminist. With this in mind I simply delete the comment whether it was a polite comment or whether it was a rude and nasty comment.

This almost invariably leads to another problem. The next day I will wake up and begin the morning process of unmoderating comments and I will, almost without exception, see this sort of thing in the moderation queue.

Well, I see that you only approve comments that you like just to make it look like everyone agrees with you. What about free speech? Aren’t you a believer in free speech?

I can almost smell the indignation and self-congratulations coming off the comment as I smile again, roll my eyes and delete these comments as well. The funny thing is that these guys always walk away believing that they have not only been unfairly moderated but also that their flimsy argument is 100% sound. They are certain, in their small minds, that they really DID find the feminist silver bullet argument.

The truth of the matter is that I have no desire to rehash the same tired argument I just dealt with a week before. The truth is that if they can’t be bothered to read the many links on the sidebar or, at the very least, the tons of articles I’ve done on the topic then I can’t be bothered to engage in the same debate with them particularly when I’ve already debunked their argument weeks before.

So, here’s a message to all of you who feel so put out that BB didn’t post your comment. If I didn’t post your comment to a post it’s because I’ve already addressed it in another post!

See, here’s the deal. I’ve already heard your argument and defended myself against it in a post that most likely took me hours to research, cite and organize. I’ve spent hours of my time and hours looking up statistics, personal accounts, scholarly articles and so forth and I’ll be damned if I’ll go through it all again just because you’re too lazy to look it up.

In the first three months of running this blog I debunked every pro-porn argument more times than I can count and, to date, I have not found another original argument.

See, here’s the deal. I’m not going to lead you by the nose through feminism. I have no intention of arguing the exact same point that the last fly by night troll handed me a mere week ago. If you want to post a pro-porn argument on one of my old (or new!) posts then don’t even bother until you’ve checked the links to the many anti-porn sites on the right side of the page AND the archives links to old posts on the left side of the page. If you really want to argue with me about pornography at the very least you must inform yourself.

I will not debate a point that I have addressed time and time again. I don’t care how polite you believe your comment to be, if I have addressed it I won’t be posting your comment. If you have a truly original argument (very, very unlikely) then I will take a stab at it however I will warn you that I haven’t seen a ‘new’ argument in years.

Time and time again I put my effort into constructing logical posts that take hours to research and complete. As a body of work this entire blog has, at some point or another, dealt with whatever ‘unique’ and ‘bulletproof’ argument that you have posed. You are not special, or brilliant or even all that logical. So, if you have posted a comment containing an argument that you believe to be rock solid and I have not approved that comment what it means is that you are unoriginal and I have already tackled your particular argument before. Indeed, it is most likely that I have dealt with it again and again and again and I won’t be your teacher. If you wish to learn the anti-porn stance then look at the links and the archives, the material is out there. If however, you simply want to argue a point that you pulled out of your ass without checking out first then be forewarned:

I’ve heard it before and I’m not going to be your personal mentor

If you have a serious argument that I haven’t heard, one that is unique and insightful it’s likely that I will deal with it, probably in its own post. But I’m not going to publish comments which detail arguments I have had so many times I’m blue in the face and I definitely won’t be leaving your already debunked argument as the last comment on a thread that is months old.

Do the research. Clearly you know how to use google and surely you know how to click on a link. Once you have read all you can read on this site and others and you’re STILL certain that you have an argument that hasn’t been covered at great length by any of the radical bloggers or incredible feminists that I’ve linked to on the site, THEN you can post and only then will you actually have a shot at getting your comment up.

So, if you’re one of the unfortunate people that I have not let through moderation don’t assume it’s because your argument is the feminist silver bullet. It’s not. It’s just that most feminist bloggers have neither the time nor the inclination to deal with your same old-same old comment that they dealt with just last week.

Another day another comment eh? So, as everyone knows I enlist comment moderation so that I don’t have to subject my readers to the same old, same old. To be perfectly honest the numbers of trollish remarks has declined substantially since I began to utilize moderation. Apparently misogynist assholes really get peeved when you don’t give them a forum in which to patronize, bully or talk down to women *shrug* go figure.

Anyway while the numbers of trollish or just plain silly remarks have substantially declined I still get a number of them. Most wind up in a file that I use to log all nasty and offensive as well as downright ridiculous comments. Every now and then though a special gem shows up that is worthy of a post. In this case I got a comment on a very old post of mine entitled The Asshole List. I did that one quite awhile ago and sometimes I get paleo-trolls who like to go through the archives and post something on a long dead post.

This fella was a winner and so I decided to keep it and respond to it directly. The comment is in bold…ready?

I am ::gasp:: a male

I’m sorry about your luck. On another note notice how his opening line is a perfect example of what we commonly recognize as the anti-feminist whine, “You hate men!” This is clearly illustrated with the *gasp* in the center. As if I am somehow appalled at the existence of a male within my space. As if I will suddenly embark upon an elaborate cleansing ritual involving hen entrails, sage and some Latin incantations to remove the male presence from my computer. Cute eh?

and I think you miss the greater point

Oh and so YOU think I missed the greater point? Well, since you have already claimed your male status it must mean that you’re correct, right? Of course, I don’t even need to read the rest of your statement because you’re a *gasp* male and therefore you MUST be correct. Well, golly gee my friend, I guess I should just sit down and be quiet so I can fully comprehend the brute logic of what you’re saying. What’s that? You didn’t read the rest of the site? Oh, well I’m sure you’re correct anyway.

Porn in and of itself is no worse than say watching a cooking show

*slaps forehead* Oh goodness gracious me! How could I have ever missed that stunning revelation with my puny little girly head! I forgot that the last time I watched Emeril Lagasse he grabbed that turkey and called it a good bitch before brutally fucking it while slapping it and telling it that it likes it. Yep, I clearly remember that episode in which he kept telling that whorish turkey, “You like that baster don’t you bitch? Take it you dirty bird”

How in the world could I have gone all these years without making the connection? Yesiree, you’re absolutely right. Cooking shows are JUST like pornography. Thank you for your wise words.

Before you rant and whine listen to my explantion.(sic)

*sigh* Well, I’m glad you reminded me before my hysterical woman hormones took over and forced me to ‘whine’ and ‘rant’ and perhaps even be *gasp* churlish. Oh and I’ll be sure to listen to your explanation because, as we all know, you’re da man! Does anyone have any smelling salts? I fear I shall be overcome with vapors from my fickle female hormones. Thank goodness this ever so studly man is around to tell me what the real deal is!

A cooking show demonstrates something that you may not currently do or have knowledge of

*nods enthusiastically* Yes, Yes! I see now! You’re right. I remember that one time on the food channel when I saw that show where five chefs jumped in and began fucking that bundt cake. They showed me that when I make a bundt cake the correct procedure is to be certain that the cake knows it’s place! Now, when I’m in the kitchen I scream to the batter, “You WANT that flour don’t you you saucy little slut bundt?” and as I’m beating it with the blender I tell it, “Oh shut up you whorey little bundt bitch! You KNOW you like being blended! You know you like it. Tell me how much you LIKE IT!!!”

I feel much better for that show because now I’ll be damned if I’ll let that cake get away with not knowing its place. NOW it knows who’s boss. *nodnod*

But, if you watch it enough you are going to try cooking

On a more serious note this guy shows what all the studies have proven time and time again. Men like to try out the shit they see in porn. They want to try it out themselves and, since most of the porn out there is violent misogynist hate speech, well guess what ladies? Not only that, but he will see his misogynist demands being no more harmful than a cooking show.

If you watch it with your partner and begin to criticize their cooking because it isn’t as good

This is code for, “When I watch porn I decide that I don’t like ‘plain old sex’ anymore and so I will begin to tear away at your self esteem by making you feel inferior and by criticizing you until you are a mere shell of the woman you were before. After that you will give in to whatever demands I make of you”

But no, guys know what fantasy is and what reality is…right?

Without realizing that the person who is cooking has usually very little talent

Ahhh, ok so now the porn star has no real talent to give you an orgasm. Or wait, was it the partner who had no talent? No, wait, perhaps he’s saying that cooking shows will make you criticize your partner before you decide that neither your partner NOR the chef has any fucking clue what to do. Or maybe he’s saying that dogs bark at the moon on Saturday night during a light snowfall….wait a sec. Where was I again?

And it is all handled by assistants behind the scenes.

I think that maybe at this point he’s saying that there are stand ins behind the scenes in porn flicks? Maybe there are stunt doubles for women? No, wait, that can’t be it. Well then, maybe stunt doubles for men? No…hold on a sec. OH! Maybe he’s saying that the phenomenon of fucking a woman in every orifice while cursing at her and slapping her is all special effects…you know, behind the scenes stuff.

Now, we all have to eat

Holy SHIT! He finally said something that I can make sense of! *rushes off behind the scenes to get smelling salts*

Yes, Virginia there is a drive called eating. We must eat to live *nods sagely*

And we all have sexual urges

Oh see now, just when I thought you actually had a brain cell in your head you go and ruin it by comparing the very real NEED for food to the DESIRE for sex. Ok my chef friend I’ll explain this to you because I’m really quite indulgent that way.

Food is something we cannot live without. We die without sustenance of some sort. Indeed food is something that, were we deprived of it, we would soon find ourselves six foot under.

Sex, on the other hand, is NOT a need. It is a DESIRE and while we all like to fulfill desires it is important to not get them confused. If you stopped masturbating right now and never felt another orgasm again you could continue to live.

Now perhaps you are simply not aware of the difference between a need and a desire, or perhaps you intended to deliberately overstate the importance of sex and sexual desires by comparing them, quite wrongly, to a genuine need. In either case your desire for sex is not, in any way, comparable to a genuine life sustaining need. So please, in the interest of not being labeled a complete moron you may wish to stop confusing the two intentionally or accidentally.

The diff is that we usually don’t harm others with our cooking

Oh, I get it! Mr. Clever means to make an analogy between cooking and sex! He’s stating that we don’t usually harm others with sex! Oh no, wait a sec….let me read that again. Maybe he’s saying that we DO usually harm others with sex since he appears to be comparing it to cooking which harms very few. Or maybe he cooks when he has sex? Or maybe he has sex with what he’s cooking?

Of course, if he is saying that we don’t usually harm others with sex then I have to say that I disagree. Most forms of sex involve some level of coercion and many, many women are harmed with sex. I would say that between harassment at work, on the street, with boyfriends, at bars as well as rapes by husbands, fathers, and boyfriends that lots of women are harmed by men and their sex drive.

But with sex it is not just a casual activity

Oh, it’s not? Damn, I’ll have to cross off “have casual sex” from my Friday agenda. Of course, perhaps he is saying that sex should have more weight added to it. But then he was the one who made the cooking analogy. Or maybe he’s saying that cooking isn’t casual either? Or that they should both be casual? Or none of them? Or one of them? Or that sex should be casual while cooking shouldn’t? Or perhaps cooking should be casual and sex shouldn’t? Damn, get me those smelling salts again.

Feminism has done good

Why thank you for noticing!

but

Oh no…this is code for “Everything I just said doesn’t mean shit because what I really feel is this….”. I sense a disturbance in the force…yep, yep, it’s someone getting ready to use the ‘but’ defense. For the uninitiated you never, EVER use a ‘but’ in a sentence that is meant to make someone feel better, for example:

“I feel bad that I beat the shit out of you but you shouldn’t make me so mad!”

“You didn’t deserve to be raped but what the hell were you doing wearing that skirt?”

“I like you well enough but you’re ugly and your momma dresses you funny”

You get the drift? “But” is codeword for, “You can’t yell at me because I said something nice first!”

also must take responsibility for the harm it has done also

I know *hangshead* I take FULL responsibility for my foremothers getting women the vote! The responsibility for telling women that they deserve to have their own sexual autonomy that is not reliant upon a penis is my crime. Oh the horror!. I see now how my working to give women equal consideration as men in this world has been so very harmful to the poor men like yourself who just want to cook in peace. I repent! I shall never again tell a woman that her choices and her right to be treated as a human being are valid!

Indeed, I shall start telling them that they have no business dressing in a skirt or saying “No” to your sexual advances!

You see as a male raised by a strong mother I was taught manners and respect.

Yep, I can see that by all the insults you veiled into your comment. You sir are the pinnacle of respect and manners! Miss Manners better watch her back because you sir, are bound for glory!

Of course there is also the little problem of just because you say it’s so doesn’t make it so. As well as the problem of letting a man (no wait…I got that wrong, letting a “*gasp* man”) decide what is manners and respect rather than a woman because of course if HE thinks he has manners and respect then those little bitches should just recognize it!

I hold the door for people and say please and thank you

So did my x husband who also raped me and sadistically tortured me sexually. Sorry friend, the fact that you hold a door for people and say please and thank you means nothing to me.

And told not to think of women as objects

Says the man who believes that sex drives are akin to eating. Oh no, wait a sec….there’s another disturbance in the force I predict that our friend is about to develop a case of foot in mouth disease again….

But

There’s that word again. “I’ve been told not to think of women as objects but….

We know what that means. We’re about to find out that he really DOES think of women as objects! Ready? You’re going to LOVE this….

when women sleep around and use sex as a tool it makes it harder for all women

Ahhh, I see. Not only does he think of women as objects but it’s the fault of all those women that he sees them that way. So let me get this straight. Sexual urges are like food yet when a woman acts upon those sexual urges she makes men treat women like objects?

No, wait….I get it. You think that those who have a wrinkly little elephant in their pants have urges that are akin to food but women don’t. So, you were talking about male sexual urges? Not female sexual urges? So, did you deliberately use gender neutral words to describe this? Or was it an attempt at not sounding the hypocrite you are?

Oh and let me get this straight, the reason that you’re a sexist pig is because women have forced you to use them like objects? And so because that evil, nasty little jezebel actually did what you wanted her to do (i.e. have sex with you) she made you treat her like an object?

But wait! It gets better. The other thing he accuses is that those slutty, casual sex temptresses who have no sex drive but who do it anyway are making it even harder for the good, old fashioned girls? Men aren’t doing it. No, men became invisible sometime between fucking the turkey in the kitchen and passing smelling salts to the lady who has passed out. Of course NONE of this has anything to do with men because HE is the male equivalent of Miss Manners and would never THINK of touching a woman. Indeed, it must be that all of these poor men who simply had the misfortune of being born with such a life threatening need are being tempted and tortured by the women.

And you know what the best part is….

It’s all our fault! That’s right folks, it’s the fault of feminists that this man has come to see women as objects.

Just as what one man does influences your opinion of all men

Nah, it’s not just one man. It’s the male collective. I assure you that as a woman there are lots of shitheads out there. It’s not just one man.

What one woman does helps men to rationalize that “women really want [insert item]

I see, so rape, wife beating, catcalls, sexual harassment, prostitution and sex slavery that men engage in is women’s fault? Or even better, it’s the fault of the whores in pornography? You know, the ones that you watch on your television screen but who you secretly blame for the objectification that you feel of all women. Not only that, but it’s also comparable to a woman having consensual sex

Let’s follow the logic train shall we? So, one man rapes a woman. The woman gets angry and scared of men and it colors her view of men. A man begs a woman to sleep with him, she consents and so she is responsible for that man later deciding that all women are objects. The man who decides that all women are objects then goes out and rapes a woman. But see, it’s not HIS fault. It’s the women who slept with him through the years who caused him to see women as objects. Or maybe it’s the dirty whore in porn who he willingly googled to watch…unless of course that same woman grabbed his wrists and forced him to type in ‘barely legal teens’.

By this logic rape IS the fault of women.

Polite my ass. It sure as hell isn’t MY fault that my rapist raped me. Yet, when you place women in the position of ‘gatekeeper’ they can never win.

because I saw it as acceptable behavior by another woman”

Aha! I knew it! I KNEW that men were unable to differentiate between what a woman in porn does and what a woman in real life does! Thank you my friend!

Oh, and I see that it’s also a woman’s fault if a man does something horrible because surely some woman in his past did something crazy and he didn’t have the brains to understand that perhaps not all women like it. Must be because all of his energy is going towards fulfilling his ‘need’ of sex.

Wow and he thinks that I’m a man hater. No seriously. I mean this guy believes that men are too stupid to understand that if they are with (or see) a woman who appears to enjoy being degraded or raped that ALL women will like that. Evidently this guy is saying that men are just too stupid to understand that women are individuals with individual preferences.

Note the misogyny dripping from this assumption, as well as the man hating. Not only does this guy believe that his half of the population is too stupid to understand that women are individuals but he also doesn’t believe that women are individuals.

So, given the premise that what one man or woman does represents everyone in their sex makes about as much sense as saying that because I think breasts are beautiful that I want rape women so that I can see more of them.

Ummm…what? What? *stutter stammer* ummmmm….clarify?

I think he’s saying that one person doesn’t represent their entire gender. But wait, earlier he said that women, especially those whorish women, colors all perception of women. He said that feminists have hurt women by making them think that they are sexually equal. The reason this hurts women is because when a bunch of women start thinking that they have sexual urges and then act on them that men begin to objectify them. However, now it seems as though he’s saying that you can’t judge an entire gender based on a few people. But wait, didn’t he say that HE judges women based on a few people?

Damn, my head is about to explode. And that speaks nothing about the second sentence.

Oh wait! I think I see now. He’s doing that thing again. You know, that thing where men have mortal NEEDS and women don’t. I get it. He’s saying that whorish women color the outlook of all men and force them to objectify them because they’re not being chaste enough but that women shouldn’t use that same judgment on men!

I think I get it….

You can’t have it both ways, there is no absolute freedom..except when I don’t want it

Ack. My head exploded *wipes head from computer*

Am I trying to get absolute freedom that doesn’t exist? Or maybe I don’t want absolute freedom that doesn’t exist. Maybe I don’t even know that I don’t want the absolute non-existent freedom. Or perhaps I know that I don’t want the non-existent absolute freedom which doesn’t exist because I already know that said freedom doesn’t really exist? Or perhaps the non-existent freedom is too busy teasing me with its sluttish ways for me to know that I don’t really want it? Shit, I don’t know, I’m off to the kitchen to scream at my bundt cake then I’ll feel like a real man again…er….I mean, I’ll feel like a real woman again.

Finally, the reason why violent porn exists and sells is that sex is a very strong urge.

Oh no, here we go again with the urges. So, sex and violence are synonymous with one another. Apparently because sex is a strong urge then beating women, raping them and otherwise violently violating them is also a strong urge. Presumably because our friend here believes that sex and violence are one and the same.

Or maybe this has something to do with non-existent freedoms that I don’t really want…or perhaps it has something to do with Emeril Lagasse? Or maybe it has something to do with feminists being the cause of all of this?

Or maybe I’m right and it has everything to do with one dude thinking that sex and violence can be used interchangeably.

Are you seriously saying that violent porn with its insults, hitting, slapping, raping and degradation is just as harmless as someone wanting to eat a distasteful dish? Is this what you are really honest to goodness saying?

Oh well then perhaps this will make you feel better. *whispers* “I get off on kidnapping men, tying them to a bed and castrating them with rubber bands. Then I like to slap them around a bit before stabbing them repeatedly and then forcing them to eat their testacles while I laugh maniacally through their tears and dance before them proclaiming “I am the eater of rotten fish and you will RESPECT my authoritay!!”

It’s the same thing! Really, it is! I promise it is! It’s just that I have different TASTES than you. Don’t judge me because I want to slice your testicles off and force you to eat them before choking you with a two foot salami and making you eat your vomit. How dare you question my tastes! You MUST be a woman hater!!!

The real problem is that if there exists no morality then there exists no law

No actually your ‘morality’ is defined by your non-existent male whatchamacallit in the sky. Keep your morals off my vagina you sicko!

And with no moral law, you have a very thin shard of bullshit hold back the barrier of humanity against savage animalism.

Ok, so I think what he’s saying is this: Keep your dirty legs closed you whore because lookit what you make us do when you flaunt all your girly bits.

And it also doesn’t surprise me that while he’s pumping up morality he’s also neglecting to note that perhaps it’s not all that moral to beat and rape women in violent porn. That of course, is perfectly moral, it’s those damn harlots who are immoral.

You know what amuses me the most? That he compares his behavior and his own twisted desires against animals. Heh, don’t flatter yourself my friend, animals would have nothing to do with you OR your moral bullshit.

Ok, for the last time, “You cannot make an analogy between violent pornography causing harm to women and action movies”.

You know, I see this defense over and over again. The person who pipes up, in the middle of a feminist discussion about violent pornography with this: “Fine, if you say that violent porn is bad because men can work up to these things then why aren’t you fighting against violent video games?” Invariably these asshats type out their dysfunctional diatribe with a self-satisfied smirk on their faces believing that they have just stumbled upon the equivalent of the feminist silver bullet.

Wrong boys. Try again.

This argument not only displays a frightening level of cognitive dissonance in those who are lame enough to use it but, more importantly, the argument is just plain silly. Sadly however, it appears that people really do believe that a cartoon showing violence against a drawn rabbit and a pornographic film of a real live woman being put into real live pain are really analogous. I’ve heard more arguments of, “You should be working to ban The Terminator if you’re going to try to ban violent porn” than I can stomach.

Now, the well read and well seasoned feminist can easily see the utter stupidity of such an analogy. So much so that we often refuse to even entertain it, however, for the benefit of the uneducated twits who continue to espouse this bit of overused tripe I will go ahead and describe, in full detail, why this is always a check mate in a feminist discussion.

In short, today is remedial feminism day here at The Den.

However, to be able to explain some of the reasons that this pro-porn argument falls flat we must look to a basic human drive: The drive for pleasure.

Humans, as well as other mammals, learn most readily through positive reinforcement. It has been known for a long time that, as a general rule, when a human being experiences something pleasurable then they are far more likely to engage in the pleasurable behavior again.

There is also a little thing that, in animal training circles and also in psychology circles, is known as “Self-Rewarding Behavior”. A self-rewarding behavior is any number of actions which, for the doer of the action, produce a reward which is not dependent upon another person to give. Many animals engage in self-rewarding behavior, that is, a behavior which produces pleasurable results to the participant that they can engage in without aid from anyone else.

Why are these concepts important? Well, in terms of violent pornography and the propensity of human males to have their views of women ‘tainted’ by their chosen medium these concepts are very important.

Orgasm, as it pertains to humans, is arguably the most intense of the pleasurable feelings for the person experiencing it. Humans, like most other critters, won’t normally engage in behavior that they find NON-pleasurable. Example: If you derive no pleasure from being hit then you will most likely try to avoid being hit. Likewise, if you derive lots of pleasure from being hit (forgetting for a moment the mental health issues with such a thing) then you will likely seek out someone to hit you.

Now, it is well known to researchers who study both humans and animals that most creatures will learn far quicker and far more solidly through positive reinforcement. Before I start my upcoming analogy I want to tell everyone that I’m NOT an Evo-psych proponent, however, with that in mind I will try to draw an analogy here and I’m hoping that everyone will see where the analogy comes from instead of saying, “Hey BB, are you saying that humans are animals? Because I remember one thread a long time ago where you got pissed off over this.” So bear in mind where this analogy is going and what it’s intended to do.

I have spent quite a few years training animals. Dogs and horses being the two species that I have the most first hand experience with. For this analogy lets take a common behavior that people would pay me to ‘fix’ in our canine friends.

People would come to me with a dog that wouldn’t ‘come’. I would take the owner and the dog out into an enclosed area and ask the owner to turn the dog loose and then I watched. Invariably I would see this (or similar) string of events:

At which point I laugh my ass off and respond by saying, “NO, the dog is fucking BRILLIANT!”

The dog was a smart dog, after all if you were a dog would you want to come back to an owner who hits you and screams at you every time you return to them? Then its time to do a bit of role reversal (and for those of you who are curious, YES I have actually done this with clients in the past). I explained to the clients that we were going to do a little test. First off I will not be speaking to you in any way that you understand me (normally I would simply say, “Blah, blah, blahblahdoodeblah”).

Then I would tell the person that their job was to act like a dog. When we got into the role-playing aspect I would wait a few moments as we walked around the property but soon I would begin yelling, “BlahBlahblah!” at them and motioning with my hands. The owner, who was busy assuming that I wanted them to stay next to me, would stand there and look at me while trying to be a ‘good dog’. In my mind, I wanted the owner to ‘Sit’ but I never told them that. In any case, as the scenario played out I would take the owners hands and slap their hands before screaming, “BlahBlahblah!!!!” at them until the owner was completely flummoxed and invariably ran away from me. It was then that I would begin chasing them screaming, “BlahBlahBeeDoopBeBlah!!!!”

At which point we would both start laughing, you see, the dog was pretty damned smart after all eh?

We would then do the same scenario, only this time I used positive reinforcement to get what I ‘wanted’ from the owner. We would start off the same way, but this time my voice got quieter and my ‘blahblahblah’ was softer. I used my hands to touch the owner’s hips and I’d say, ‘blah’ nice and quiet. Within moments the owner figured it out and sat on the ground at which point I would smile and hand them a candy bar.

The point of this ridiculous trip down memory lane is to point out that ALL creatures learn faster, better, and happier with positive reinforcement. ALL creatures enjoy positive feelings and experiences and they seek to replicate them whenever possible.

Enter orgasm and, in particular, masturbation.

Now, it’s also important to note that we also learn by repetition. When we are rewarded, (or reward ourselves) over and over it becomes far more likely that we will engage in the same behavior.

Orgasm is arguably the most powerful tool that we have in our arsenal of positive reinforcement. Orgasm initiates the release of very powerful chemical in our brains which leave literal chemical implants in the surface of that grey matter. (I will pull the cites for it later, I have them on the harddrive but my time is fast growing short) It has been shown that orgasm, and the release of the all important endorphins that come with it, leaves lasting chemical ‘markers’ in the brain. Chocolate cake doesn’t do it, neither does just about any other thing that we experience on a regular basis, but orgasm DOES.

Now, let’s try to tie it all together ok?

With violent pornography (ok, ALL pornography) we are exposing our brains to a heady dose of chemicals that will leave a lasting impression upon the surfaces of the old grey matter for a very long time.

We are using repetition to, in essence, ‘train’ a given set of associations to a given behavior. Just like ‘triggers’ for people who deal with PTSD or other such trauma related conditions we are placing ‘triggers’ into our own minds when we masturbate and orgasm to violent images. In essence a ‘trigger’ is something that brings back the feelings that a trauma survivor experienced. Many times these ‘triggers’ are things that imprinted upon the brain during a time of particular stress. For many people a ‘trigger’ can be a place that reminds them of where they were when violence was wreaked upon them, for others it’s an image, or a certain touch or a smell.

But what if those ‘triggers’ were associated with very pleasurable memories?

When we masturbate to violent, degrading pornography we are, in essence, placing ‘triggers’ inside of us while simultaneously reinforcing it with what is arguably the most powerful feelings of pleasure the physical body is capable of. We are literally etching chemical ‘pictures’ in our heads of whatever we were viewing at the moment of orgasm. These ‘pictures’ remain, oftentimes for an entire lifetime, and they become a ‘trigger’. When something we see reminds us of that image we are then reminded of the extremely pleasurable sensations we felt when we last saw the ‘trigger’.

We are literally conditioning our bodies to respond in a physical way (i.e. sexual arousal) to the ‘triggers’ that we have etched into our minds. We are using the pinnacle of self-rewarding behavior, (masturbation) to repeatedly imprint a given scenario in our heads which we have trained ourselves to associate with the most pleasurable feelings that the human physical body is capable of.

Don’t fool yourselves people, this is a dangerous as fuck phenomenon.

At BEST a lifetime of viewing degradation, violence and pain inflicted upon women will cause you to not be able to orgasm without the use of such visuals whether those ‘visuals’ be physical pornographic pictures or mental ‘visuals’ that aren’t ‘real’.

This is the BEST case scenario. Worst case scenario? Your head becomes so mired and stuck in ‘violence against women is the equivalent of the pinnacle of pleasure’ that you attempt to act it out by either A) Talking a woman you presumably love and care about into pretending to be your rape victim or B) Actually raping a woman.

There is no other outcome to a chemical saturation that imbeds these ‘triggers’ into your mind.

Now I’ll go ahead and answer the question from above:

“BB, you have a problem with violent pornography? Well, why aren’t you going after violent video games?”

My answer: If people were masturbating to violent video game images designed specifically to arouse and bring about orgasm then they would no longer be violent video games but would instead become violent pornography.

The simple fact of the matter is that there can never be a comparison between a movie, a video game or a song and the repeated, prolonged, and conditioned response that one sees when one has spent a lifetime masturbating and etching images into ones head.

It is the masturbation (i.e. the orgasm) which makes the pornography far more dangerous than the average violent video game.

Most boys are exposed to pornography before the age of 13. When these boys die they will likely have practiced the pinnacle of self-rewarding behavior (i.e. masturbation) many times more than they will have experienced the actual act of sex with another human being. Under these circumstances, knowing what we know about repetition, it is far MORE likely that these boys will have absorbed the messages that pornography is sending them FAR more than they will ever have absorbed the messages that real, live women who have real live sexual relationships with them send.

On average young boys are engaging in masturbation to pornographic images far more than they will ever have actual, physical sex with a woman. Therefore, the chances of having the chemical etchings and instilling the ‘triggers’ into their minds via what pornography shows them will indeed have a far greater chance of being permanently instilled than any experience they have with a real live woman.

Of course, it really shouldn’t take a huge post to get this message across but some folks still insist on hiding behind ignorance and refusal to use any sort of critical thinking (or at the least to use Google to search for actual data). These same folks are the ones we hear saying things like, “Well, you should ban violent music as well, and while you’re at it you should go after Cowboy movies too!”

Perhaps us crazy radical feminists would be going after cowboy movies if they were designed to bring about an orgasm through repeated watching designed to condition the viewer to be sexually aroused and masturbate every time a showdown at high noon is mentioned.

And now that we’ve covered that topic again I hope not to have to deal with it for a good, long time.

It’s a search I get all the time, and each and every time it pops up on sitemeter

I want to scream at the top of my lungs.

A few weeks ago I was sitting at my desk sipping gingerly on my hot cup of coffee. I popped into sitemeter to log the searches and there it was again, “FreeXXXpics” my hand trembled and my smile turned into a frown of wrath and fury. What was it about this particular phrase that sent shockwaves through me?

I very nearly threw my coffee cup at the wall that day, so enraged was I by the search. Clearly, this shit was getting to me. Several days later, I took my burnout time but now I’m back again and the phrase is still haunting me. So, this morning amidst the chaos of homeschooling, networking for the rape campaign, researching and so on I decided to plug in my Zoo Tycoon for a few minutes.

As I was cleaning my virtual Rhino cage it hit me. In a flash a lightbulb went off over my head and I closed the program and began to write, the first draft of that writing was confused and garbled. Perhaps it still is now but I suspect that remains to be seen.

The FreeXXX search bothers the fuck out of me because it shows callousness so deep, an entitlement so broad, that it literally bounced entirely off my paradigm for all this time.

“FreeXXXpics” exposes its searchers for exactly what they are, male privileged fucktards who feel that they are so entitled to women to degrade that they shouldn’t even bother paying for it.

They want to use as many women as possible with as little outlay, and one phrase keeps ringing through my head, they don’t even feel they should have to pay for it. The women, the scads of women being paid next to nothing, all of them have stories, all of them have lives, none of them looked lovingly at Mommy and Daddy as a child and said, “I want to grow up to be a FreeXXX girl”.

These women had hopes and fears and dreams and aspirations. These women were little girls with button noses and piggy tails who trotted around the playground at recess. All of their dreams from childhood, their aspirations of being veterinarians or schoolteachers or botanists are gone and what’s left? A cunt. A pussy. An object.

A thing.

Those lost dreams of having ponies or growing up to be a doctor or counselor or marine biologist are shattered on the floor like so many shards of glass. Their stories are individually different, individually unique but as a collective most of them tell a very similar story. How many abusive boyfriends did it take to train them to be the FreeXXX girl? How many pushes, punches, rapes, and abuses did it take for them to finally watch as their dreams fell from that high shelf in their minds and shattered into fragments of lost hope on the floor?

All that pain, all that loss, all those souls and dreams and aspirations…and they’re not even worth a fucking nickel. Not a dime, not a quarter, not a fucking cent.

They’re worth a wad of cum in some jerk-offs hand and he won’t pay them a cent.

I don’t know why, but the fact that their dreams and hopes aren’t even worth a fucking cent to these men grates on my very last nerve. It angers me in a way I can barely describe. I can see the faces in my mind and I roll back the years to a little girl in braids, who is swinging on a tire swing, or a dark haired little girl riding a pony, or an African American little girl playing in a schoolyard. I see dollies and trucks and fishing poles. I see small hands playing in dirt, picking up worms or playing dress up.

I was a child once. They were children once, just as you, just as your mother, your sister, your aunt. At some point they saw a person on TV, maybe it was a Veterinarian, or a Scientist or even the fucking President and they looked up at their parents and with a big smile said, “That’s what I want to be when I grow up”.

What happened to them? Men happened to them. Society happened to them. They bought into the idea that transforming themselves into a cunt, a pussy, a sexbot was empowering AFTER they realized that Vet, Scientist and President were out of the question.

How many dreams do you see around their dead eyes when you type in that horrible phrase? And why don’t you even feel it’s worth a penny to you? How could you? How could you feel so entitled to women and cunts and pussy and your own chubby little cock that you can look at them and NOT see the sparkles of the glass that was their aspirations?

I can see nothing but the reflections of shattered hopes.

These men have no value for life, no value for emotion or dreams of anyone but their own. They don’t even think that her lost dreams are worth a measly dollar, they are worth less than a candy bar from a vending machine. They’re worth less than a cup of coffee at the gas station. Their aspirations don’t even merit the same worth as a piece of penny candy, so much so that they go out of their way to specify that their degradation MUST be free.

What scorn and disdain for life these men must have.

I’m sitting here on my laptop and I’m remembering the point at which I stopped fighting it. The point at which I stopped resisting the oppression around me and I succumbed to it entirely. What was their breaking point? What moment was it in their lives that pushed them to stop fighting it?

It’s a horrible thing to be apathetic to the pain and sadness of another soul. It’s even more horrible to actively seek out that pain and sadness. The worst sort of horror is when you say that you aren’t willing to give up a fucking thing to be able to get off to that pain and sadness.

These are the FreeXXX girls.

These are the daughters of the Patriarchy, these are the women that the institutions of man has created and I bleed for them. These are the girls who men don’t even care enough to pay for. These are the women that are truly expendable in our society and they know it. They’re the FreeXXX girls, the FreeHotttCunts, they are the girls that male society hates and loathes and yet craves to get off on.

It must make men feel so superior and powerful to have that kind of misery, the sadness and legacy of broken dreams and shattered lives, at their fingertips. It must be such a power rush for them to see these women, these living, breathing, feeling women, reduced to mere holes for their amusement, degraded and humiliated. And to be able to acquire this sort of power, the sort of power that the nerdy geek-boy who’s a closet misogynist has always longed for, to be available for free.

There can be no doubt that the Patriarchy takes care of its own. It supplies degradation and power for free at the click of a mouse. How many of them? How many faces and lives? The FreeXXX girls, the slut of cyberspace, the fuckhole object who has her face cum upon by countless millions of men. The ultimate object, free, ready, voiceless and faceless a mock-up of the male fantasy of control and domination right there for every male to violate and use.

Yes, the Patriarchy takes care of its own. Creating women who are lost and alone, posing them, starving them, addicting them to whatever drugs and numbing medication they can use to dull the pain and then putting them out there for free. And, to ensure that it has covered its bases, after destroying their hopes and dreams, after locking them into pink collar hell and taking every ounce of power and autonomy they can have, after training them for 18 years they cover their tracks by saying, “It’s her CHOICE!”

And that is supposed to be the end of the discussion.

But it’s not the end for me. The audacity of these dudes that they won’t even pay a cent for the misery and suffering of these women, that they specifically request to have their objects free makes my stomach churn with an emotion I can’t even identify. A strange mixture of hate and sadness and rage roils in my gut, threatening to spill out and onto my keyboard.

Even now, thinking about those words with that FREE stipulation added to them I am shaking and sick. It says much about our world that the FreeXXX girl has become so popular; it says much about the mindsets of our worldwide culture that a woman can be stripped of everything and be free for the taking. That she can lose her dignity, her autonomy, her personhood, her dreams, her life, her aspirations and she is so worthless, and all that she has lost is so worthless, that she is free to whomever wants to use her today.

The FreeXXX girl is the equivalent of the free bumper sticker. Cheap, worthless, and only there to get out the message. That message being: “Come one, come all, we gotcher’ degradation and objects here”. And to uphold this institution of man we must have a lot of these women available, we must teach them that they are better than the freeXXX girl at all costs. That they are not only better but that they can have her like oxygen or food. She is one more consumable resource to men and how many of them are there? How many do they see?

Are they looking at 20 FreeXXX girls per ‘session’, 3 sessions a week? 240 a month? How many faces do they remember? I wager that few of them remember any. The faces are interchangeable to them, the dignity and dreams and the little girls hiding inside the shaved bodies and starved torsos are interchangeable to the men who seek them out.

This is the entertainment of our ‘culture’ (and yes, I use the term loosely). This is the entertainment that makes more money than almost every other form of sporting entertainment combined. This is the number one entertainment for our world, the FreeXXX girl, the unlimited access to the most wretched and disposable members of our society. You can tell a lot by a society’s entertainment, what do you see when you look at ours? Where do women fit into that equation?

Look at Rome. What do you see when you think of that civilization, gruesome blood sports? Gladiators? No surprise that Rome was a violent culture, look at what they enjoyed doing in their spare time.

Look at us. What does our entertainment look like? Shattered women, displayed, distorted, starved and shaved. They are eerily reminiscent of slave markets where the slaves were ‘advertised’ with few (if any) clothes on, degraded, stripped, unempowered.

There is little surprise that our society is a rape world, a rape culture for a rape world. There is little surprise that women are the largest group of poor, the largest group of welfare recipients, and the largest group of the abused.

Years ago this country, the U.S.A., outlawed slavery. It outlawed men being able to take their egos and self-esteem from the complete degradation of other humans. But women, who were the driving force behind outlawing slavery, were soon to literally take the place of the slaves. Women of all color, black, asian, white, it didn’t matter; men, white men, black men, asian men, all knew that they must, at all costs, continue to abuse at least one segment of society. They must, at all costs, keep at least one group available for mass consumption, for mass degradation, for mass hatred, and the men, all of them, decided that they could unite in the oppression of women.

Years ago our country outlawed keeping slaves, but women of color were never freed and women of all stripes soon took the place of domestic slave. Sure, they did it before the new laws, women have always held the same place as the FreeXXX girl, a place of worthlessness, of expendability, but now, with men being able to unite in their oppression of women, ALL women took the brunt of what was. And that continues to this day.

And today, this very moment, dreams are being lost and right now, as I type this some woman has had the shit kicked out of her one too many times and her beautiful sculpture that represents all of her hopes and aspirations is crashing to the floor. Right now another FreeXXX girl is being created. She will be sacrificed at the altar of male pride and ego, the altar of the penis because she MUST be sacrificed. She MUST be made available to anyone who wants her and she is made for men. She is empty and hollow and servile because she must be to feed men’s lust for power and control.

I figured out today why the FreeXXX girl makes me hurt so badly, why my hands shake and my mind becomes filled with useless babble, she is a marker of what every woman is to men. She is the embodiment of what men project onto the masses of women, the millions of us who are trying to crawl out from under the boot of the Patriarchy. She elicits within me so much anger and shame and fear because she is what they want US to be.

Hopeless, robotic, empty vessels that they can use and discard. Emotionless things who appear only to be used and degraded and then disappear with the click of a mouse.

I yearn for a world when every man looks at that computer and sees, in brilliant clarity, not the cunt or the pussy or their own flaccid penis, but rather the sparkles of the dreams that were. I long for the day that they see the glass on the floor when they see her face and her dead eyes and the idea sickens them and they turn away with the click of a mouse.

She shouldn’t be Free, her dreams were worth something, her emotions, her smile, her humor her intelligence, they were worth something. They are worth something, they’re worth a million of the men who would use her today. And that is a price I’m willing to pay.

Mink Stole brings up a point from ‘Lesbian Caricature’ that I have been meaning to address for a long while but have been unable to formulate words on the topic. Women and porn.

It’s high time I did something on it though because, quite frankly, it comes up rather frequently. It’s almost as if the phrase, “But BB, women look at porn too” is intended to completely remove any and all problems with porn just because, ‘women look at it too’.

It’s a topic that needs addressing and, quite frankly, I’ve held off on it because I don’t want to alienate any women reading who are currently ‘on the fence’ so to speak, over pornography and the harm it does. Unfortunately it’s been coming up more and more lately and I don’t think I can hold off on it anymore.

First I want to acknowledge Mink Stole and her (rather brave) comments. Kudos to you for telling us about your experiences as well as filling in some of the blanks I had on gay male pornography. And now I’m going to jump right onto the bandwagon and come right out with my story.

I too used porn and I am a woman. For a many years when I was younger, I looked at pornography. My soon-to-be-X really started it for me. Until that time I had obviously seen porn and I had even watched it at the prodding of my first X but I never ‘used’ it myself, as in, I never popped in a video when I was by myself to masturbate to. My second husband changed all that and within a few months of moving in with him I was actively watching it as well.

Like Mink I also watched quite a bit of BDSM porn. It didn’t start out that way, but it sure as hell ended up that way. My X inaugurated me into it and my ‘porn phase’ lasted around 2 years (give or take). Mind you, that was 2 years that I was actively using it myself rather than just watching it to pacify the man I was with.

Like Mink I too changed my mind. This happened slowly however. What I can tell you from my experiences as a woman is that initially I was repulsed by pornography. My stomach would churn and grind and my face would remain frozen in a mask of disgust and, I daresay, apprehension and fear. Slowly though, this changed for me, but it never changed completely.

Even whilst I was actively seeking porn out I would always feel dirty and stained after I watched it. I would look for the stuff I wanted to see, watch it, masturbate, orgasm and then promptly go and shower. It’s a very difficult sensation to describe, this sort of revulsion coupled with the compulsion to look at it in the first place, this strange cycle of compulsion, justification, masturbation, revulsion and cleansing.

I began to realize that there was a serious problem when, one night, I was having sex with my husband and realized that I was seeing porn images in my head while we were being intimate. I noted this relatively early on and it troubled me. It bothered me that I was ‘seeing’ porn in my mind, that I was seeing the degradation of women (and yes, it was pretty much always women) and getting off to it even when the actual tapes were no longer playing.

At first this was an unsettling occurrence, a strange intrusion, but I wrote it off. I would recognize the image in my head and I would try to turn my mind elsewhere, like maybe onto my actual husband, the man whom I loved and cherished (at that time anyway). But, after a time, focusing on my husband began to feel strange, harder somehow than just thinking about the images I had seen before. It was easier to regurgitate the stuff I had seen earlier in the day, or earlier in the week.

There came a point where this became very troubling. A point in which I began to feel dirty and stained from the images my head and my television were spewing out at me. There came a time when I began to shower after sex, NOT because I just wanted to shower, rather because I felt just as dirty as I did when I was watching the porn.

There was a problem and it was making me feel simultaneously dirty, sexual and self-conscious. Slowly but surely I began to question the things I was seeing. I began to wonder why I despised those women and yet was using them, even in my own head, to get off to. Slowly the veil began to thin and the guilt and disgust I would feel afterwards would grow stronger than the compulsion to look at the stuff in the first place.

Eventually I sat down and had an honest discussion with myself. I asked myself honestly, what was I getting out of porn? The answer surprised me. It terrified me. It shamed me and disgusted me and the twist in my gut that I felt when I heard my own answer, the defensiveness and immediate arguments that sprang to my mind proved, more than any lie detector test, that the answer was indeed correct.

I was getting a sense of power from watching the humiliation and degradation of the women on the screen.

I was claiming power, the all-elusive power that women strive for their entire lives, from degrading and enjoying the degradation of other women. I had absorbed a lesson from the patriarchy: women are easy to degrade, weaker, and more vulnerable, so much so that even another woman can take their power. Watching women being slapped and hurt was filling that void within me that was taken so many years before by men. It allowed me to feel powerful and in control.

That’s what I was getting out of it. I was getting a sick satisfaction at watching other people be humiliated.

For me it had to be women I watched. The thought, the very idea of taking control from a man could not, ever, manifest in my mind. The idea of humiliating a man was so foreign to me that my mind discounted the possibility of it immediately, before it even blinked on the radar. I had spent my life with men controlling me it was clear, at least to me, that I would never get power from them. Instead, I turned to women even more vulnerable than me. Women who were even EASIER targets to take power from than I was.

Clearly, these women were pained, and I watched it. I saw it in every movie, in every picture, in every scene. I watched and heard the fake screams and I took power from their misery. I watched their faces twist for just a moment into a face of pain when they were penetrated anally; I saw it and I used it to make myself feel better. In some way I was taking their power. It was ME, it was certainly ME wielding the power over them in my mind, and it was the thought of ME taking their power on the screen that brought me to climax.

It wasn’t the sex, it wasn’t the vaginas or the breasts or the tanned skin. It wasn’t some sort of biological excitement from seeing two people having sex (although, that’s what I told myself for a very long time). It was the power that is inherent in degrading and humiliating another human being that brought me climax. I was stealing THEIR power, taking it from them in my fantasies and on my TV. With every orgasm I was stealing the little dignity that these women had left and using it to feed my own, seriously lacking, seriously damaged, sense of power and control and self-esteem.

And I hated them for it. I hated them for reflecting my own weaknesses back at me. I despised them for allowing their dignity to be taken from them, just as I had done myself. These women were, in so many ways, a reflection of me, of my OWN powerlessness, and I hated them for ‘letting’ themselves be used in such a fashion.

At the same time I hated MYSELF for using them. I hated myself for being a vampire of sorts, a kind of ‘self-esteem vampire’. A creature which was incapable of making her own self-esteem and who therefore took it from other humans. But self-esteem garnered at the expense of another human being does not, and never can, replace your own. It simply drains from your body because it never belonged to you in the first place. Power that is stolen from another person is always empty power, it never fulfills, it never leaves its mark on you for more than a few days, sometimes even a few hours.

This is the hallmark of EVERYONE I have ever met that uses pornography, males and females alike: low-self esteem and a horrible fear of being exposed as being weak. The common theme inherent in everyone that I have ever met who uses porn is low-self esteem, oftentimes depression, a sense of worthlessness, and a sense of being out of control. Porn becomes the mechanism by which these folks, males and females alike, gain control. There is an almost universal deep-rooted sense of insecurity, combined with a fear of failure. And these fears and these worries are alleviated, at least for a time, through porn.

But it’s not as simple as that because stolen power is never power and the sense of control only lasts for a little bit before the same old fears come creeping back in. The same old doubts, the same fears of failure, the same insecurities.

Pornography is about control. It’s not about sex, it’s not about lovemaking. There is nothing natural, normal or healthy with pornography.

Yes, women use pornography, but the fact that women use pornography doesn’t make the dangers of pornography disappear. Rather, it brings them into sharper focus. Women who are using pornography are getting high on the same sense of control that men are. Women who are using pornography are degrading the women in their mind and hating them for the same reasons that men are. The difference is that women will many times wake up of their own accord. Since we ARE women, we see the degradation and we, just as men, train ourselves to get off to that degradation. Unlike men however, we realize that we ARE women and sometimes, oftentimes, this realization hits us when the men we’re with begin to want to degrade US in the same way that WE are degrading the women in our minds, or the women on our computers or on our TV’s.

It is then that many times we will realize the dangers and see that WE were only a tiny margin away from being THAT woman ourselves. When our partners begin to want to degrade US the way that they degrade THEM, the false distinction that we make in our own minds between US and THEM disappears entirely. Then we realize that we are just as vulnerable as they are. It is then that we understand that we are no different than the porn stars, we are just as vulnerable to men as they are, and the power and control that we believed we were getting was simply not real. It was just a phantom, and now we’re being asked to perform those same acts.

That moment comes for many women. That moment when their partners ask for the things that the porn stars did. And we recognize the trap that we’ve laid for ourselves.

That’s what happened with me. Soon my husband began to ask me to do the same things for him that the porn star was doing. What could I say then? I mean, after all, I was watching the same damn thing he was and he knew it. If I didn’t do those things then I would have to admit to myself that they were degrading and I’d see the paradox, I’d see the holes in my illusion. I’d be forced to see that I wouldn’t want those things done to ME, and yet I wanted to see them done to other people.

So I did them. I did them and I tried to pretend that I liked them. I tried to act like the porn star because I was invested. Soon however, I began to see JUST how horrible it felt to have cum on my face. Just how terrible I felt when he called me a ‘whore’ and a ‘slut’. I realized that when he asked me, “Do you like that you little whore?” and I moaned “Yes, fuck me harder” that I really didn’t like the way I felt afterwards.

I finally saw it all for what it was and I finally sat down and had that talk with myself. I finally saw my intentions and what I was getting from the porn, what I was getting from watching women be called names and be spanked. I saw it and it fucking scared me to death. It scared me and it shamed me and even now, at 6:30 pm on a Monday night a full 12 years later I am still shamed.

This was a post I didn’t want to write. This is my own confession; this is the story of a woman who watched pornography, who consumed the pain of other women to soothe my own painfully damaged confidence and self-esteem.

It was only after I pushed the pornography from my life that I was able to feel good about myself. It was only then that I began to be able to be honest about the things that I liked and didn’t like. My husband didn’t like it. He raged at me, angry that I would ‘suddenly’ take away ‘his right’, that I would do such an about-face.

He continued to watch. He continued to ‘indulge’, openly at first, and then on the sly when he realized that I refused to let it in my home. I watched his slow progression into wanting more from me. The way he took his confidence from me, the way he fought the battles with me over sex, over the things I would and would not do for him.

For those men and women who insist that pornography is harmless I ask, why do you watch it?

For most people that answer is, ‘Just to masturbate to’, but I’ve found that I’ve never met someone who watches porn who is truly confident.

When I was watching porn I was more insecure than I have ever been in my life. I was chaotic, I drank too much, I self-medicated with alcohol and sedatives to numb myself to my own sense of worthlessness. I allowed degrading things to be done to me because I was numb, I was dead inside I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Since I have stopped watching porn, since I stopped allowing it in my life and in my home, I began to heal. That healing took a long time; it was hard to do when I was living with a man who was still taking power from a real, live woman, the way he and I had both taken power from the women on the screen.

For those of you out there who do not believe that pornography is degrading to women, I ask you something. For men, would you want your daughter, your sister, or your mother being treated the way that men treat women in pornography? Think for just a moment about your father calling your mother a whore while making love to her? How about the thought of your daughter laying on her back spreading her vagina wide open for a stranger and the camera?

You don’t think porn is degrading? I suspect that if you ask yourself the above questions honestly you will find yourself with answers that belie what you say to others.

For women. If you don’t believe that you’re getting power from pornography then ask yourself, would you really WANT to have 3 men ejaculate on your face? Would you really want a woman to don a strap on and fuck YOU doggy style while calling you a whore and a slut?

Would you be a porn star yourself? With everything it entails, rather than the Jenna Jameson fairy tale? Would you be the free internet girl?

First of all, if you are a male and you frequent strip clubs and use escorts, I want you to know that those women hate you.

If you’ve ever given money to a stripper, you’ve probably given money to a girl or woman who has spent the last 20 minutes laughing at you, either with the other girls or on the inside. You buy a lap dance and inside she’s criticizing you, laughing at you, mocking you. She’s mocking what you’re wearing, how you’re speaking and everything about you.

When a man would pay me to give him a lap dance I would spend the entire time internally laughing at his breath, his pimples, his fat belly, anything and everything I could. These women hate you, and no amount of money you can give them will make them like you any more.

I was underage when I was enmeshed in this life; I had just gotten a car and I was barely 16 years old. I can remember, very vividly, the first night I stripped. I was terrified. That first night was at a hotel that was pretty strict with its nudity policy, and all I had to do was wear lingerie and then try to sell it and garters. Easy…right?

I nearly chickened out entirely, but I had just been kicked out and needed that paycheck, I needed the promised tips and the ‘big money’ that everyone talked about. I was young and scared and needed to come up with my rent money quickly. Deanna was trying out her first night as an escort while I began here, in the hotel. It was terrifying, but I got through it. Halfway through the night customers began buying me drinks. I don’t know how many I consumed but I remember being concerned about driving home.

Through that period of time I not only stripped. I also did bachelor parties and worked as an escort. The degradation and terror that is always there is just another part of the job. The hands, the greasy, disgusting hands, were always there, groping at you while the eyes were staring at you. I was little more than a walking Barbie doll, and I was critiqued by some, and worshipped by others. Of course, that worship consisted of men telling me what “nice tits” I had, or how they’d like to “bang that pussy”.

See, here’s the deal: just as the men who come to the bar have to be completely devoid of empathy for the women they’re buying, the women also have to be completely devoid of empathy for the men who are buying them. It’s a survival thing, and besides, how can we like you when you’re paying to own us? No, oftentimes women will think and fantasize about smashing your head in with a baseball bat while they gyrate in your lap. But of course, we can’t really do that can we? For whatever reason, we must allow ourselves to be bought and sold for the erections that men get over the power associated with owning a human being.

So, while we may be thinking about how disgusting your teeth are, how horrible your breath is, what a stupid shirt you’re wearing and how we’d like to run a cheese grater over your smug face, we’re smiling and looking at you through submissive eyes as we robotically rub our bodies over yours. But that anger has to go somewhere doesn’t it? And, just as with everything else, it does. The anger turns into something else, and oftentimes it is turned inwards. We starve ourselves and abuse ourselves, and let you abuse us because we believe we deserve it. Other times we dull the pain, using alcohol and downers to rid ourselves of the anger, to crush it and keep it in check.

Most often we use several of these options simultaneously. We turn our anger onto other women, onto ourselves and onto our children but we can’t turn that anger onto men; that would be too dangerous. We learn, very early on and particularly when we strip, that men are dangerous. They are more dangerous than anything else we’ve ever known.

Be assured that the stripper you see hates you. She drowns her hatred in alcohol, or burns it in a cloud of pot smoke, but she’s still angry.

The life of a stripper is a life of sexual harassment. Men grope at you constantly, trying to put their fingers inside of you when you walk past. You are called names, and told to “Bring that cunt over here you little whore”. And you do. You bring it over there because you’ve told yourself that you are powerful when you do so. That’s yet another way to control the anger and the humiliation. You wrap it in empowerment, telling yourself that you’re the one who’s really coming out on top. You tell yourself that you’re the winner because that nasty fucker gave you every bill in his wallet, but deep down inside you know what’s really going on and you continue to medicate, you continue a cycle of ups and downs.

Sometimes, as a 16-year-old stripper, I would find myself on the floor of my rented bedroom at Deanna’s house, surrounded by the things I had taken from my room at my parent’s house. I had a stuffed clown and large black and white stuffed panda bear. At times I would fall into a heap on the floor of that bedroom, an ashtray and a can of Old Milwaukee beer at my feet, while I cried into the fur of that panda bear. I remember thinking that if one more man tried to stick his fingers inside of me that night then I’d fucking kill myself. I remember looking longingly at kitchen knives but always being too terrified to actually do it. And then, about an hour before we were due to leave, Deanna might knock softly on the door.

Sometimes, we lay on that floor together and cried. Me, a 16 year old girl with a bag of vibrators, dildos and anal beads stuffed into a briefcase for use with my ‘clients’ on the escort side of the business, and Deanna, a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman whose face showed more pain than any face I have known before or since. Sometimes we’d cry on the floor of that bedroom and then, after our tears were spent, we’d stand and smile and hug each other and go about the task of getting our things together.

We’d change into our makeup and our clothes and we’d leave and drive to whatever club we were due at, or to the office itself to await the phone calls of the men who wanted to buy us.

As a 16 year-old stripper I had men throw alcohol on me, I’ve been spit on and then been paid to rub it into my skin. I’ve been fingered by complete strangers as I walked past them. I’ve been slapped, grabbed, pinched and mauled by several men at once. I was called names and had my hair pulled. I’ve had men take their dicks out of their pants and I’ve had men cum in their pants during a lapdance and then try to stick their hands in my mouth.

I’ve had men ask me my age, and on the rare occasion when I would tell them the truth, perhaps from some hope that they could help me, they told me that I was the same age as their daughter and then offered me money to sleep with them. I’ve heard sob stories about their horrible wives and families, and how the bitch stopped putting out as soon as he put a ring on their finger. I’ve heard all the stories, all the lies and all the bullshit.

I’ve had men call me the most vile things imaginable and I’ve had them pay me to do the sort of degrading things I can’t even talk about.

The anger that stems from this is all consuming; it eats away at you slowly, despite the efforts you make to contain it. A full 17 years later and I’m still enraged. The seed that was planted all those years ago has turned into a tree and that tree has branches that are vast. Every thread of anger goes down another path until I find even more anger at the end of it.

I remember now how angry men would get at me when I told them that the woman who stripped for them the night before was most likely silently laughing at your hair or teeth or bad clothes. I think about how angry men have become when I tell them that the poor woman whom he tossed his $20 at would probably just as soon have gouged his eyes out with her nails as looked at him. I remember how mad these guys got, how they seem to think that they should be able to buy not only the bodies of these women to degrade and to use, but that these women should also be grateful for it, they should actually like him.

They think to them, “Hey, I’m a nice guy! I was nice to her!” but never once do they connect the fact that buying another human being for the purpose of controlling that human is NOT a ‘nice guy’ thing to do. Of course she should like it, she’s a whore and she should love it when I give her money for doing what she would normally be doing for free anyway. They always seem so shocked when I tell them the extent of the hate. When I tell them the things that us girls would say behind their backs, or after our set when we would get back to the house. These men seem livid and surprised that we would discuss how you were so fucking disgusting that it was all we could do not to throw up on you. Then, we’d knock back another shot.

Thinking about these guys, these men who get insulted that the object they purchased wasn’t particularly enamored with them, makes me even more irate.

The rage still consumes me, the anger lies just below the surface.

I remember it well, and now as I sit here typing on my laptop in my bedroom I realize that the anger and indignation is still just below the surface. I am disgusted by them. I am enraged at them. At this moment I can say that I literally HATE each and every single man who thought it was his entitlement to BUY a human being.

I learned that it wasn’t about sexual excitement for these guys; it was about entitlement and degradation. It was about power and control, it was about owning another person, another human being. They were rarely just happy with just buying us, they wanted to degrade us and make us perform disgusting acts for them. I know that these men who visit strip clubs and who watch pornography and who pay prostitutes would also buy a slave to work the fields if they thought they could get away with it. These men who like to believe that they are forward-thinking ‘nice’ guys are the same men who would buy a slave, and to be completely honest, I don’t give a flying fuck if that enrages them or not. These are the men that would buy another human being because they get off on power and control.

Buying a woman is little different than buying a slave, and I’ve been bought before. Cloaking it in ‘free will’ is a lie, a great big steaming lie. How much ‘free will’ does a 16 year-old have when she’s been kicked out? Every girl I knew, every single one of them that I worked with, had stories. Those stories are stories that curdle the blood, stories of rape and incest, stories laden with abuse and selling the only thing they had of value in this society.

There is no doubt in my mind that these very men would purchase slaves, sexual or otherwise to work their fields and jerk them off when they wanted it.

Men who buy and look at pornography are exactly the same. These are also men who feed off of power and degradation the way a tick feeds off blood. They are parasites and they are incapable of finding any worth within themselves, therefore, they steal it from women, they take it and use it and then they look for more power when the rush of degradation has worn off. They believe, with every fiber of their being, that they have a right to buy human beings.

I want, once and for all, for men to know that women in the sex industry have been abused by men just like you. Rape and incest are the recruiters for the sex industry, and you are victimizing her just as her rapist did. She hates you and she hates all that you represent. She smiles because she must smile, she dances because she knows no other way, but she despises you and others like you.

{Editor’s Note: I don’t know the original title of this post, and the last few paragraphs are missing. If you have a better version, please contact me.}

Several years into my second marriage, my husband, like so many others, came to me with a problem. Our sex life was getting ‘boring’, why don’t we try to ‘spice it up’? I was a bit puzzled since, to me, the sex was fine and dandy, but I was open-minded and had a “Sure, I’ll try anything once” outlook. So, with that in mind, my X took a trip to the local sex store and came home with a pair of fuzzy cuffs.

At first, I kind of enjoyed it. The reasons for this, I have since come to understand, were a direct result of my earlier abuses. I fell into a submissive role easily and readily. In some way, I was trying to act out my earlier rapes in a ‘safe’ environment and, just for the record, that is not healthy either. However, at the time, this seemed like a ‘safe’ way to regain control of earlier abuses in a ‘controlled’ environment.

Soon, however, it escalated. It began with fuzzy cuffs with cute little ‘safety releases’ which worked well to soothe me into believing I actually had control. Eventually, it moved to Velcro stuff which was more difficult to actually remove if I wanted to. All the while he was bringing me home BDSM magazines and videos with women as submissives. The material became more and more hardcore and he wanted to play out every picture in the magazines and videos with/on me.

Honestly, I’m not sure when I began feeling unsafe, I’m not sure at what point the ‘therapeutic’ reenactment of my previous rapes became not-so-therapeutic and, more than that, damaging, but it did happen. The nightmares came back, haunting me in my sleeping hours. My self-esteem plummeted, and I began internalizing the things that my husband told me while having sex. I began to believe I was a whore, a slut and that I liked to be hurt.

The dominance play gradually escalated as each new ‘thing’ quickly got ‘old’, and was rejected in favor of something more extreme, more painful and more degrading. I have since heard of this process of desensitization and now I understand what was happening; what was once titillating and exciting for him, quickly became an old hat and something new came in to take its place. The new stuff was always a bit more extreme than the old stuff.

In the time that I lived with BDSM, I watched as the abuse began to escalate. And I was confused, I was frustrated. I didn’t know whether I liked it or not. I knew I hated the clamps and the chains and the whips but I didn’t hate the way he seemed to value me when it was happening.

I felt like a sort of traitor. He would talk to me, tell me how much he loved me, as he was tying me up, spread eagle, to our marriage bed. He would kiss me gently, more gently than he ever kissed me before we fell into this strange ‘fantasy’ of BDSM. Then he would hit me, or whip me, or stick strange things inside of me and I was supposed to like it. I knew, somewhere inside of me, that I was supposed to like it. The confusion set in and my mind became divided. This was my husband, the man I had sworn to be with, the man who pledged his love to me. Surely, he didn’t WANT to hurt me, and, even if he did, it was my husband, the man I loved. The man who loved me. I was supposed to be enjoying his attentions.

Love, sex, rape and pain became synonymous with one another. Sex didn’t exist without pain. Love didn’t exist without being called a slut, a whore, or a dirty nasty little slut whore. My concept of love began to twist into something so alien that I fight, right now, as I’m writing this, for the words to describe it. Rape didn’t exist, it was simply sex. Sex didn’t exist, it was always rape. Love couldn’t exist without degradation and the phrase “Love Hurts” began to take on a whole new meaning for me.

I became a divided woman. When he came to me in the morning and put the nipple clamps on me I knew that I was not free. What began with fuzzy cuffs and playful ‘spanking’ ultimately led me to a place where the man I loved tried to seal my vagina with hot wax. And you know what? It was all the same. By that time, pain, love, sex and rape, abuse, and degradation were all the same. Respect was nonexistent and the saddest part of all, the part that makes my heart hurt even now as the memories race through my head and my hands shake from the fear welling within me, is that I didn’t know the difference.

His muttered “I love you” was the same as his “You like that you little whore, don’t you?” His fingertips trailing down my side was the same as the numbing pain when he fisted me after hitting my genitals with a whip.

The previous abuses I had endured, my rape when I was a child, became the same as the ‘sex’ we were engaging in. The line disappeared, and, for a time, I didn’t think that there was such a thing as rape, so hazy had the line in my head become. Of course, a part of me rallied against this, and it was that part that insisted on showing me nightmares at night. That part of me wailed at the division, it insisted on reminiding me, in mind numbing horror that I had been raped. At night my head showed me everything for what it was. Flashbacks, nightmares, insomnia, anxiety attacks, all of these things haunted me daily.

I think that the first time I felt ‘real’ terror was when I looked down at him with a needle in his hand, poking into the skin of my nipple, drawing blood, threatening to pierce it. I screamed in terror and unadulterated horror as the cross stitch needle, the very needle that I had used to make the wall hanging in my living room, disappeared into my flesh. When I screamed he stopped, put his hand up, and clamped it over my mouth. I felt fear. I felt it wash over me and all the pretenses fell away. I knew I wasn’t in control. I knew that his words had been lies. His reassuring words, whispered in a husky voice that I was ‘Safe’ that “No matter what happens know that I won’t hurt you, I love you” I knew it was lies. I saw behind the veneer and I was terrified at what I saw.

From there on the rift inside of me widened. My ‘Mouse’ (the part of me who was the quiet, meek, finishing school girl) told me that I was being silly. She soothed me with her words, telling me that I was simply being unfair to him to suddenly desire to deny him what he so obviously wanted from me. She told me that I had the ability to make him happy and here I was denying him. She reminded me how hard he worked to provide for us and how I was a traitor if I believed that he could or would, actually hurt me badly. Every time he raised the bar she excused it and I believed her, or I tried to anyway.

On the other side of the divide was the Warrior. She screamed at me to kill him, to hurt him, she screamed at me that he was raping me. The Mouse countered by telling me that I enjoyed it, how could it be rape if I enjoyed it? And, even if I didn’t enjoy it, I was his wife and that’s what women do they sacrifice and THAT is the greatest power of all. The two sides began warring for control, the Warrior telling me that pain and sex and love and rape are NOT the same, they are different, they are opposite poles on different ends of the galaxy. The Mouse told me what is pleasure without pain? What is love without anxiety? And mostly, she argued that I was being so uptight.

Meanwhile the abuse continued and escalated.

At the high point of my abuse, cloaked as BDSM, he would insert things into my rectum and force me to go to the store. He tried, on several occasions, to ‘seal’ my vaginal lips closed with wax, or clamps. Rape became not only inevitable but indistinguishable from sex. He held me down amid my screaming protests and raped me, and it was the same as the sex. There was no difference. I took it all as different shades of grey in our ‘enlightened’ sex life.

I began to doubt that my rape at 10 had even occurred, as in, was it even rape? How could it have been, when it was the same as what was happening in my bedroom all the time? How could it be rape? Surely, I wouldn’t be living with a rapist? Surely, the man who told me he loved me couldn’t actually be a rapist? My mind refused to latch onto that concept, the Mouse would have none of it and the Warrior screamed from beyond the chasm in my mind.

Abuse and pain were the norm of my life for a period of about 5 years.

Finally, I spoke to him. Finally, I told him that I was tired of BDSM. I told him I longed for the days when he had actually made love to me. When he was tender without ropes, without chains, without pain and spit and whips. I cried. I asked him, in my desperation that day, to “Please, just make love to me. Please make love to me now, prove to me that you still can.” I told him I needed, craved, desired a gentle touch without pain.

He tried. Until he entered me, then his hand crept to my neck and there it was, the same old dominance. He squeezed my neck and I was gasping for air as my head got light. I cried as he ‘made love’ to me and the tears flowed freely down my face before dropping onto his hand. He kissed the tears away as I cried and it was then that I realized that this was not love. He was incapable of love and I wondered and I heard my warrior crying out to me, I heard her words from across the divide and my heart sank and my tears dried as he finished the act.

From then on I resisted him, I resisted the BDSM. I tried to tell myself I had won, I tried to tell myself that he no longer took out the whips and the chains and leather lay unused in a duffle bag under the bed. But I hadn’t won; every time we had sex, he had a hand on my throat, he had a hand pinning my wrists.

It has been pointed out as of late that rape existed long before pornography did. This is generally used as a blanket statement to exonerate porn from any ill effect. Obviously, there are several problems with this idea, though it seems like a strong enough thought on the surface.

Sure, rape has existed before pornography was invented, if we assume that cave paintings aren’t pornography. (For those of you who use the defense that porn has been around in the form of cave paintings for that long I’d also like to point out that rape has been around that long as well so you’re kinda shooting yourself in the foot with that defense) For the purposes of this discussion we’re going to assume that porn, as we know it, has been around for about 30 years give or take.

For us to determine what role porn plays in rape, we first have to determine what rape is. Is rape sex? Is rape control? Is rape a hybrid between the two?

Rape is using sexuality as a weapon to punish or control another human being. For rape to occur at least one other thing must happen. The rapist needs to see his victim, not as a human being, but as a creature that is less than he is. He has to have lost his ability to empathize with her pain. He has to view his victim as little more than an object. Objects do not feel. Objects do not object to their treatment. Objects do not have a say in what they are, they just are.

Here’s what I contend. Porn causes rape because porn is built on the same principals that rape is built on. Control, domination and objectification. Porn doesn’t cause all rape, but all rapes share the same values that porn shares. Control, domination and objectification.

These things are present in each and every rapist. The core belief that a woman’s desires are less important than a man’s desires. That a man’s desires have a right to be fulfilled by any means necessary. The core belief that women are simply a means to an end. An ideology that includes controlling people around him. These are all touted, with great reverence, in pornography.

In pornography, sex becomes violence. Slapping buttocks, calling women names, dehumanizing them, all are part and parcel of pornography. All of this does a fine job of conflating sex with violence and those are the VERY things that rapists have in common; conflating sex with violence.

Rape is a crime that perverts control with sex. It is a way to hurt women through their sex. To control women via their sex.

Porn perverts sex with control. It defines women by their sex, objectifying them in the process. Pornorgraphy is a medium through which pain and pleasure become almost inextricably linked.

Rapists are not born, they are made, and our society is making them. Porn is making them. It is making and creating rapists by instilling the very same notions of control, dominance, submission and sex that all rapists have.

No, porn doesn’t cause all rapes. Nobody has suggested that. Although, the porn apologists have a hard time seeing that and they make an assumption that if rape has been around since before porn that porn cannot be causing rapes. What they’re NOT looking at is that porn holds so many of the same ideologies that rapists hold that the two are intrinsically linked.

In porn we see a woman being fucked by a man. Her screams of ‘pleasure’ are eerily similar to a scream of pain. As he is fucking her he may be slapping her on the buttocks, he may be calling her ‘Whore’, ‘Cunt’ or ‘Slut’.

In rape we see a woman being fucked by a man. Her screams are screams of pain, which are eerily similar to the screams of ‘pleasure’ from a porn star. As her rapist is fucking her he may be slapping her, he’s probably calling her a ‘Whore’, a ‘Cunt’ or a ‘Slut’.

In porn we see women, stripped, the focus is on their parts they are objects for consumption.

Rapists do not rape humans, they rape objects.

Porn creates rapists by hardening them to a woman’s protests, by hardening men to women as HUMANS first and women second. The values taught in porn are identical to the values of the rapist.

There can be little doubt that porn causes men to view women through a callous lens. It allows them to disassociate from them entirely. In porn, women are presented as objects, nothing more, and the number one thing that a rapist has to possess is the ideology that women are objects.

There is no way around this. Sure, there are other mediums in which women are objectified, it happens all the time, but porn is the only media which displays sex, objectification and control all in ONE package. It is the ONLY medium in which pain and pleasure become inextricably linked. The ONLY medium in which women are so clearly dehumanized and degraded. And those people who refuse to see it, those people who claim that they CAN’T see it, the ones who say that there is nothing dehumanizing about being called names while engaged in sexual intercourse, are already dead to women.

If a person is unable to see how the acts in pornography degrade, dehumanize and objectify women then they are already useless to women. They are already on their way to meeting at least one of the criteria of a rapist, that criteria being decreased and/or no empathy towards women.

I say that the ideas and messages inherent in pornography, in ALL pornography, is a glorification of the rapist’s mentality. Pornography is not just a byproduct of a sick society; it is a documentary of a sick society, a reflection of a sick society, and an instruction manual for being a member of a sick society. Just like the Gladiatorial Games were a reflection of, a documentary of, and an instruction manual for the brutality of ancient Rome.

And if an Emperor in ancient Rome passed decrees and laws intended to make Rome a peaceful, less brutal place with peaceful people, but without changing or banning the Gladiators, it wouldn’t do a damn bit of good. You’d have a Rome that preaches peace but whose people were still violent.

Apply that to pornography. Want a real-world example? Look at Sweden. Every politician has to claim to be a “feminist” to get elected, and they have scads of “feminist” laws on the books… but they still have rape, sexual violence, glass ceilings, and most of the other problems associated with mindsets. Not just any mindset, but mindsets that porn promotes.

A society can often be judged by its most popular form of entertainment. Pornography is a 56 billion dollar a year industry, which is more than the NFL, MLB, NHL, and NBA combined. That’s more than the yearly revenue of ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox combined. Pornography is unquestionably our most popular form of entertainment. It is a reflection and a reinforcement of what our society values.

Are the porn values the same values you’d want your children to learn in school? Porn values nothing more the degradation and dehumanization of half the population to make the other half feel secure in their dominance.

Pornography and rape are not related by some mystical “common cause” any more than bomb making and publishing the Anarchist’s Cookbook are. They are simply reflections of each other, and pornography FEEDS rape. Rape FEEDS pornography. It’s a vicious cycle that has to be broken somehow. But that’s another post .

Pornography causes rape. The evidence shows it no matter how you try to twist it around. The “common cause” of pornography and rape could be said to be a society that exists on the domination and oppression of a female sex class, but then you have to take into account how both pornography and rape help create that society. It becomes a chicken-and-egg scenario, and as long as we keep chasing our tails trying to find out for certain which one is the REAL root cause before we try to fix any of it, it won’t get fixed.

Pornography is a documentation of rape. It is not a symptom of a sick society; it is a propaganda reinforcing the values and methods of the sick society. Maybe it was a symptom at one time, but now it has become an equal part of the problem.

How can we work for equality for women while ignoring or promoting(!) an industry that feeds off of inequality at every level? How can we claim we want equality, respect, and justice for women when we traffic with an industry that shows, documents, promotes, and glorifies the exact opposite of those things? Is being called a “cunt” empowering? Respectful? Equal?

Is it possible for a white guy to call a black man a “n****r” (I tried, but I still couldn’t force myself to type that word out) and still not be racist? Is it possible to empower African Americans through black face and minstrel shows? Is it possible to work for the ACCEPTANCE and EQUALITY of African Americans while we still watch, support, and absorb the concepts displayed in minstrel shows?

Porn is a minstrel show, with women instead of African Americans (and there’s a ton of racism in pornography as well, which we’ll get to in another post). Minstrel shows didn’t cause all racism, but will anyone say they didn’t significantly contribute, in a causative manner, to a racist society?

Arguing about a “common cause” or “what came first” is ineffective and a distraction. Pornography is a cause of rape. Eliminate pornography, and we will eliminate a lot of rape. Sure, there are other problems to address, other things that condone, support, and contribute to a rape culture, but pornography strengthens ALL of them. Pornography is the mouthpiece of the Patriarchy, through which all if its values are disseminated.

Until we begin to deal with that mouthpiece, until we stop allowing men to use women’s vaginas, breasts, and anus’s to speak their own agenda, our rape rates will continue to climb. Until we figure out what to do with this megaphone called pornography, we will continue to see women suffer at the hands of it. And make no mistake about it, women ARE suffering.

Perhaps porn, as a medium, didn’t cause my rapes. Porn didn’t force my x husband to rape me. What it DID do was reinforce that his desires were appropriate. That sex and rape were interchangeable. That my pleasure and my pain were indistinguishable. It told him that I’d like it. It also gave him the boner he needed to do the job effectively. It was ammunition for him, showing him creative ways he could rape me. It Showed him that fisting was something that women liked. That I should like it.

Pornography was a reflection of a society that told him that these things are normal, acceptable and pleasurable. Until people stop being selfish and understand that there are other human beings, other lives outside of their own existence, we will never have freedom.

It doesn’t matter whether rape was around first or whether porn was around first. I think that everyone can agree that rape is a crime of power.